


Chains of Being

by Shoshanna



Category: Space: Above and Beyond
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1996-04-02
Updated: 1996-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 22:23:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 90,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1404679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoshanna/pseuds/Shoshanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cooper Hawkes is an in-vitro in a world of natural-borns.</p><p>A Marine, because the judge sent him to the Corps instead of to jail.</p><p>Six years old, and caught up in the middle of a war.</p><p>Cooper has learned, painfully and well, that humans despise him, that human society rejects him: the nipple-neck, the wetbrain, the tank. That surrounded by his squadron he is still, and always, alone; that, whether in the crowded barracks of boot camp or the screaming fury of battle, none of them are like him, none are what he is. None of them are bound to him with chains of being.</p><p>Except one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In-Vitro Gestational and Educational Facility, Philadelphia, PA

**Author's Note:**

> Of everything I have ever written, this is what I'm most proud of. You don't need to know the show to understand the story.
> 
> (There are a few content notes at the end, if you want to see them.)

The dormitory that batch three-four-three-nine slept in was cool, and light was only beginning to filter between the bars of the narrow windows, some time yet before the morning bell would ring. Cooper Hawkes woke early, as he often did, and lay for a while listening to the soft rustle of his batchmates breathing around him, up and down both sides of the long room. His own breath made a comfortable pool of warmth against the pillow. Pulling the thin blanket up higher around his shoulders, he turned on his side to look out at the greying sky. The bunk shifted slightly as Tamara, below him, twisted and muttered in a dream, and across the room someone climbed out of bed and padded off toward the toilets. The sound of the flush was loud in the quiet, and Cooper thought about getting up himself.

Then Ephraim cried out, abruptly, from where he'd slept a few places over. He might have been only awakening from a nightmare, but as Cooper rolled over to look, he was getting awkwardly out of bed to stand, a little hunched, in the open space between the rows of bunks. Even in the dim early light, Cooper could see that his penis was swollen and distended.

"Hey--" he called, surprised, and Ephraim looked up and saw him watching. "What happened?"

"I don't know." Ephraim sounded frightened. Tamara was awake now, and Suzanne had finished in the bathroom and come over to see what the noise was about.

"Hey!" That was Nigel, from the other end of the room. "Something's wrong with my penis! Someone come look at this." The bunk swayed a little under Cooper as Tamara pushed herself up, going to see; he swung himself down after her and hurried to join Suzanne and Ephraim. Nigel and Ephraim were calling back and forth to each other now, alarm in their voices, and among the complaining mutters of almost fifty in-vitros being woken early the sounds of concern and worry began to mount, as word spread of what had happened. Someone turned the lights on, the sudden illumination glaring; Cooper winced for a moment, shielding his eyes, then stared again, uneasily, at Ephraim's penis. It looked inflamed, reddened and standing out stiffly from his dark pubic hair. Tamara brought Nigel over, and then Baxter pushed into the center of the group, fear on his round face, his fingers twisting in the air above his own bloated penis.

"Does it hurt?" Suzanne asked them.

"No." Nigel's eyes were wide, as he glanced from one to the other of his two afflicted batchmates, and then down again at the grotesque protrusion from his own crotch. "It--throbs, though." He felt at it, gingerly, then turned to let her touch. "It's almost hard."

"It feels hot, too," she judged, narrowing her eyes. Cooper pressed between two others to feel Ephraim's penis, comparing the swollen, rigid thing in his right hand with his own soft and flexible one in his left. It was frightening; he squeezed his own gently.

"Maybe you should go to the infirmary," Suzanne said. "You might have hurt yourselves while you were asleep." The unarmed-combat instructor had emphasized how fragile and vulnerable the male genitals were, and how effective a blow to them could be.

Nigel shook his head, then had to brush his uncombed hair from his eyes. "I don't think so. It's not really painful. Besides, the instructor said that the testicles were more vulnerable than the penis, and our testicles aren't swollen." He lifted his up in his palm to show her.

Baxter was nervously edging his weight from one foot to the other. Cooper avoided the twitching movement, taking a step away from him and closer to Suzanne and Ephraim, but watched all three of his batchmates with concern, still cradling his own penis protectively. "I need to urinate," Baxter said anxiously, raising his voice over the murmurs of the others. "Do either of you feel that?" Ephraim did, but Nigel didn't, and Cooper joined fifteen or so of the batch who crowded around a toilet to watch as Baxter and Ephraim tried to urinate. Baxter's penis was so engorged that he had to push it down with his hands to aim it, and then-- "It's not working," he said, his voice rising. "I don't know, there's something--I can't do it."

Next to him, Ephraim took a deep breath, and aimed his own penis. After a moment, he produced a stream of urine, thin at first, then steady. As it went on, the swelling seemed to subside, and by the time he shook himself dry, it was almost gone. "Come on, Baxter," he said, and put his hand over Baxter's shaking fingers. "I'm all right now. Maybe it's just some kind of problem with urination. Relax, it'll come." Under his touch Baxter calmed a little; he managed a dribble, and another, and then finally a burst of fluid.

Tamara peered into the toilet bowl. "There's no blood, or anything. But it looks yellower than usual."

Cooper only glanced at the toilet, watching Baxter's penis slowly subside until it looked almost normal again, like Ephraim's and his own. Baxter's shoulders slumped in relief, and Cooper let out a long, sympathetic breath. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes." Ephraim nodded reassuringly at him, and called out through the open doorway, "Nigel? The swelling went away after we urinated--what about you?" Tamara flushed the toilet, and they all went back into the bunkroom. Most of the rest of the batch were still clustered around Nigel, who was fingering his penis curiously.

"I'm fine," he said. "It went away on its own."

The morning bell had rung while they were in the bathroom, and some of the batch began to turn away. Unexcused lateness would mean a demerit, and now that no one seemed to be actually ill or in danger, the normal movement toward the showers was beginning. "I think we should go to the infirmary, though," Nigel added. "Just in case."

Baxter grimaced. "We'll miss breakfast." The morning bell meant half an hour until breakfast, and they were all still naked and unwashed. If they went to the infirmary, they probably wouldn't have time to eat before lessons began.

"You don't all have to go," Suzanne pointed out. "If you need treatment, the monitors will send for you--and if something were really wrong, they'd have monitored it already."

But Baxter wouldn't agree to that. Even if it was just a minor problem, he wanted to be treated right away. So after they had all showered, shaved, and dressed, Cooper and the rest of the batch headed down the corridor to the dining hall while Baxter, Ephraim and Nigel went the other way, toward the infirmary wing. Three-four-three-nine was the only batch at breakfast, but they didn't talk much anyway, eating quickly to keep from being late, and then hurrying out to get to morning lessons.

The last of the snow had melted, a few weeks before, from the open space between the dormitories and the classrooms. The buildings of the facility formed three sides of a square: the dormitories, with the dining hall and infirmary, were in the middle, and the classrooms and workshops were on the left side. The building on the right was where the monitors worked, and the batch had never been inside it. Past the buildings, on the open side, was the exercise field, where Cooper could remember sunlight that was hot, and leaves on the trees. That was before the snow came, when they'd been very young. His batch was almost a year old now, and every week was a little warmer than the one before; he was looking forward to the summer the monitors promised. Today, though, the sky was almost full of clouds, and the sunlight barely got through, shining weakly on the barbed wire that topped the surrounding wall.

Cooper looked up at the sky, watching the clouds moving and hoping they would blow away; but he stayed close to Suzanne, too, as the batch crossed the grounds to the classroom building. She didn't seem worried, though, and he began to feel a little better. She was right, after all; the monitors would have told them if it was something dangerous, and called Ephraim and the others for treatment. They filed into the classroom and sat down, and just as the instructor began to lecture he heard the door open again, behind them, and the sounds of their batchmates coming in. He exhaled softly to himself, in relief, and tried to concentrate on the lesson. Nigel asked a question, once, and his voice sounded all right.

When the morning lessons had ended and the batch was dismissed, Cooper managed to put himself close to Ephraim as they went to lunch. The clouds were still filling the sky, and it was raining and chilly; they hurried back to the dining hall with skin prickling on their arms and necks. "We're fine," Ephraim reassured everyone, "but wait until we're inside for the story, will you? I wish I'd brought a jacket," he added, shivering. Cooper had taken one from the locker that morning as they left the dormitory, and he put an arm around Ephraim, sharing the warmth. Ephraim smiled at him.

The members of three-two-seven-four, a year older than Cooper's batch, were in the dining hall, eating, when three-four-three-nine filed through the serving line. They had taken the tables nearest the servers, the favorite seats, and as the younger batch came in they looked up briefly, and then away. The sounds of conversation faded, and three-four-three-nine collected trays of food silently and slipped past the other batch, heading for seats in the back, eyes down. Behind them, three-two-seven-four began talking among themselves again, ignoring them; among Cooper's batch there was a small jostling for chairs that did not face the others.

Cooper sat down next to Ephraim, and Suzanne was at his other side, impatiently curious. Baxter was directly across from them, on the other side of the long table, and Nigel was off at the far end, already starting an explanation to the half of the batch who could hear him more easily than Ephraim anyway. Lunch was soup today, a new kind, pale red and sweet, and toasted cheese sandwiches. Cooper ate a spoonful of soup, liking the warmth, and nudged Ephraim with his elbow. "Well?"

Ephraim shook his head and bit deeply into a sandwich; he liked cheese. "The monitor said it's nothing to worry about."

Across the table, Tamara's eyes were wide. "I thought you were just going to see the medic--did a monitor come?"

"Yes, but it was all right. The monitor explained it. It's normal, he said; it's like a muscle spasm."

"No, it's not," Baxter interrupted. "It's not a muscle spasm, it's the penis filling with blood!" He glared at Ephraim with a half-challenging, half-gleeful expression, and Cooper frowned, not liking it.

"I didn't say it was a muscle spasm," Ephraim retorted. "I said the monitor said it was normal, _like_ a muscle spasm. It's the penis filling with blood, yes, and he said it'll probably start happening to all the males for a while. Usually in the morning. But it's not harmful, and it goes away on its own."

That was a relief. "Why does it happen?" asked Cooper.

"If it's blood, then maybe it's like when we menstruate," suggested Suzanne. "Only why doesn't the blood come out?"

"I don't know," Ephraim admitted. "The monitor didn't say. Just that we shouldn't worry about it. But I don't think it happens regularly, like menstruating." He ate the last crust of bread, then tried the soup curiously. "This is too sweet. Is there another sandwich?" Cooper handed him the one he'd been served, and sat with the warmth of the full soup bowl between his hands until it was time for afternoon lessons.

It happened to Cooper a few days later, and although his penis felt strange, hot and itchy, he remembered what the monitor had said and lay in bed waiting for the swelling to go down again. It had bloated to nearly the length of his hand, but it did eventually subside. Waiting made him late into the showers, though, and he had to hurry; that was unpleasant.

It wasn't nearly as unpleasant as the next morning, however, when he woke and found that he had wet the bed. He'd been dreaming; he'd climbed to the roof of the dormitory somehow and stood at its edge, looking out over the buildings of the facility, past the human city beyond the wall, and up into the sky. The sun had been warm, the sky a vast, irresistible blue, a pull he could feel against his skin as he'd gazed up into it, fascinated. Filled with a strange, causeless exhilaration, suddenly he'd astounded himself by running to leap wildly off the edge, not to hurt himself on the ground but expecting to be snatched up somehow into the brightness of the air--and then he'd jerked awake, panting with shock and something that wasn't quite fright, and confused for a moment at the dark steel of the upper bunk close above him, instead of the shimmering expanse of sunlight. And then he'd realized that the sheets were warm and wet around his crotch.

He flushed, helplessly humiliated. How to use the toilet was one of the first things the monitors had taught them, and none of the batch had done it wrong since they were a few weeks old. The damp stain made him feel like a neonate, just out of the tanks, like one of the new batch he and the rest of three-four-three-nine had been assigned to help take care of for a week last month, when they were born. Lying in the cribs, spasming uncontrollably, drooling and defecating and unable to talk while Cooper and his batchmates washed and fed them, and turned them to keep the sheets from rubbing and making sores, and exercised them as the monitors said was necessary until they learned to control their own bodies. It was--wrong, the way they twitched and babbled, and when after a day or two their eyes began to follow Cooper and the others who tended them, that was even worse. They shouldn't _be_ like that; they should be able to walk and talk and do what they were told. Cooper didn't remember the time he'd spent in the cribs, but after that week none of three-four-three-nine wondered any more why the older batch avoided them. The one time that they had passed two-nine-one-seven on the exercise field, he and all his batchmates had looked away, not wanting to see the pale, blank faces, their eyes following his batch again the way they followed everything--trees, buildings, monitors, all of it seen for the first time. Cooper's batch stopped looking at three-two-seven-four then, too. They didn't want to see any memory of themselves in the twenty-month-olds' eyes.

And now Cooper was lying in a puddle of his own urine. He grimaced, helplessly, and rolled his head from side to side. Surreptitiously, he tried to wipe his crotch with the corner of the loose sheet before he got up, so that no one would see, but the wetness was strangely sticky as it dried, and his pubic hair was matted. At least it was laundry day; whoever slept in the bunk that night wouldn't see the stain and know what he had done. He hurriedly stripped the sheets when the morning bell rang, carrying them in front of himself, and stuffed them down the chute as he went into the shower.

#   #   #

Cooper liked the physical lessons most: learning to race, and throw, and shoot, and fight. He was stronger than most of his batch, and he enjoyed his strength; in the free hour in the evenings, after the last lesson period and before curfew, he would sometimes go down to the gym and lift weights, or find someone to wrestle with, working his body to make it stronger still. He liked the way his muscles felt when he finished, warm and tired and tingling. Sometimes after a fighting lesson the instructors would tell them to massage each other, especially if they'd just learned something new, and that was good too, to rub the oil into his batchmate's skin and roll the muscles between his fingers, reaching deep for the soreness. Then they would trade places; Cooper always liked to be the one to massage first, so that he could relax completely when it was time for him to receive. Suzanne would dig her fingers in, too hard sometimes if he was sore, but most of the time he liked the way she did it best of all his batchmates. He liked massaging her, too; the contrast between her dark brown skin and his pale pink was good to look at. Occasionally the instructor didn't specify what part of the body they should work on, and on those days he liked to massage her scalp, even though there weren't any important muscles there, just to feel the difference between her tight, bristly hair and his own softer fuzz. Ephraim was good at massage too, and he was thinner than Cooper, his muscles longer; they felt good under Cooper's hands. If Suzanne was paired with someone else, Cooper always hoped to be matched with him. Baxter never did it hard enough, saying his fingers got tired.

Math was easy but boring, and the lessons in machinery, operating and repairing vehicles and mining equipment and computers, were less easy but more interesting. But four days a week, in the afternoon, they would have a lesson from the monitors themselves, instead of the regular instructors. Those were the lessons that fascinated him, and all the rest of the batch, the ones they looked forward to with a mixture of anticipation and nervousness that never let them eat much lunch on those days. That was when the monitors told them about the world outside the facility. About human culture. Natural-borns.

They knew the instructors were natural-borns, of course, and the monitors. But beyond the facility's walls was a different world, a human world, and someday they would be placed out in it, to live and work. Sometimes Cooper and Suzanne would stand at one of the windows, during the free evening hour, and look out. The dormitory was on the third floor, so that they could see over the wall, and past the empty ground that went almost to the horizon, all the way to the city where the humans lived. They would stare, craning to see the cars, the distant movements, and try to remember what the monitors had taught them; Suzanne was good at remembering things, and she would repeat the lessons, almost whispering them, as they watched. There was so much to learn, and all of it sometimes so confusing that it frightened Cooper. The monitors promised that they'd be ready, though, when the time came. Three-two-seven-four, nearly two years old now, would be placed next month.

The lessons were different every time. Sometimes they watched films, ones that showed natural-born humans at home, at work, playing. Some of the natural-borns in the films did strange things with their faces when they talked, twisting their mouths and cheeks, and showing their teeth. At first Cooper couldn't understand what it meant; he thought they must be angry, until the monitor explained to him that they were smiling, or laughing. He looked harder, then, trying to understand, but the contorted expressions were bewildering. They were so unlike the simple way his batchmates smiled, and the monitors, occasionally. The humans in the films spoke differently from the monitors, too, faster and with sudden, erratic changes of pitch in their voices. And they used strange words sometimes, so that for the first few of those lessons it was hard even to understand what they meant. Sometimes in the dormitory, before the morning bell or in the free hour, one of the batch would try to talk like a natural-born. The monitors never said anything about it.

Other times one of the monitors would lecture, telling them things. Cooper listened intently, and sometimes took notes, trying to remember it all; sometimes Suzanne would tell it to him again, while he pressed against her at the window, and they would help each other understand. Political catechism. What money was for. Some of it they'd already learned in other classes, history and geography--table manners they'd learned in the nursery before they were a month old, but the monitors went over them again, carefully.

It was in one of those classes that the batch learned about kinship.

They knew their genetic codes, of course, just as they knew their names and batch number, all of it etched minutely on a flake of metal set in each in-vitro's skull at birth. But they had never given much thought to the long strings of letters, until the monitors taught them one afternoon how natural-born human society was organized around kinship. Genetic similarity.

Each natural-born had a family, of other people genetically close to him or her. Two parents, always, four grandparents, and an indeterminate number of brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, children, nieces, nephews, and then second and third cousins, and cousins once, twice, or even three times removed: the monitor drew a diagram for them. Every natural-born was in the center of a web of kinship relations, all structured and defined by different degrees of genetic nearness. Kin determined how natural-born humans lived, and studied, and worked. It was a unique relationship, the monitor told them. A special bond between kin that was like no other, and that meant more than any other. Every natural-born had a family.

The monitor never mentioned in-vitros. Never in the whole lecture. And none of the batch asked any questions. All through the last hour of class Cooper felt something in his stomach, something heavy; and they were very quiet at dinner, and afterward.

It was the next night that Suzanne started it. The batch was still hushed, had been so all day, except Baxter who had snapped at Elyse during exercise class and been warned for it. Cooper was folding the shirt and trousers he'd worn and laying them, with the shoes, in the right lockers for the next day--they sorted clothes out by size at night, since that way it was easier to find ones that would fit in the morning--when he saw Suzanne sitting on a lower bunk, looking strangely at a stack of paper in her hands. He glanced down curiously, thinking she was reviewing notes from a lesson, but the sheets were blank. She looked up and met his eyes.

"I want to know," she said flatly. "Don't you?"

He didn't understand, but she only shook her head. So he went to brush his teeth, put the underwear he'd worn down the laundry chute on the way back from the bathroom and climbed into an upper bunk a little way down and across, where he could see her. She sat there for a while, and then shook her head again, hard, and wrote something across the top of the page. It was long, several lines, and she sat and looked at it, until finally Cooper let himself down from the bunk he'd taken and went over to see.

It was her name, and her genetic code. She looked up at him, and he nodded once, jerkily, and went back to the bunk. Suzanne reached up to pass the papers and the pen to the batchmate above her.

No one ever turned out the lights. All that night the stack of papers passed from hand to hand, and Cooper lay with his eyes shut in the eerily bright dormitory, listening to the sound of one batchmate after another reading through them, slowly, and then the sound of the pen. Metal creaked, from time to time, as someone got out of bed to hand the stack on. He fell asleep, finally, though he didn't realize it until Elyse shook him awake again, standing by the bunk. She gave him the papers and the pen, but she wouldn't meet his eyes before she went back to where she was sleeping, across from him and on the bottom. She rolled up tightly in the blanket and turned to face the wall.

Cooper sat up and squared the pages gingerly on his knee. He was afraid. What if some of the batch were kin after all? Could in-vitros have a family? The monitor had said families lived together, usually, when they were close kin. But natural-born humans didn't live in dormitories the way in-vitros did; since they all lived together already, would any who were kin move out, somehow, together? He tried to imagine how he would feel if Ephraim and, say, Tamara were kin, and if they--took one of the bunks, maybe, upper and lower, and claimed it for themselves every night? Pulled it away from the rest of the batch, or even got permission from the monitors to sleep somewhere else?

It made his stomach hurt, thinking about it, and he didn't know why.

But what if someone in the batch turned out to be kin to him? A special bond, one they didn't share with the rest of the batch. What if he and Ephraim slept apart, just them, and always exercised together, had each other for sparring partners, and--what else--helped each other study the lessons? Wasn't that like what kin did?

But he liked the dormitory. The sound and warmth of his batch around him was--comfortable; he fell asleep every night listening to his batchmates breathing. Once when he was very young the monitors had put him in the isolation cell for a night, for breaking a rule, and it had been bad, very bad. He'd been afraid to go to sleep, afraid that his breath would stop in the terrible empty silence. With someone else there it wouldn't be so frightening, but he would still miss the others. What if he and Baxter turned out to be kin?

Enough. He couldn't know anything until the whole batch had gone through the papers, anyway, and that meant he had to do it himself. He recited his genetic code, whispering it to himself from beginning to end, and remembering the monitor's explanation of how genetic nearness was calculated. Then he took a breath, and looked at the first page.

_Suzanne Sorenson,_ ` AGCG TCBB AMDG...` it went on. He read it through, carefully, figuring as he went.

No. No similarity at all.

_Ming Po._

No.

_Erik Cuttran. Anthony Iliardi Guarnieri. Hillary Prescott._

It seemed to take a long time; more than half the sheets were filled, more than half the batch's members already listed. Once or twice he saw a similarity begin, a code sequence begin to match his own; but even as his fingers would tighten on the paper, his breathing catch, the pattern would dissolve into nothing again.

Finally he was done. He crouched, knees pulled up to his chest, looking at the last name, halfway down the sheet. _Elyse Coffey,_ ` BBCA MTRA MCCT...` all the way through to the end. And below that, empty space. Waiting.

Carefully, in the best handwriting he could manage, he wrote _Cooper Hawkes,_ and his genetic code. It took six whole lines, even writing small. Then he rolled over and looked down into the lower bunk. It was Tamara, and she was awake; she met his eyes silently, and reached up for the papers and the pen. He handed them down to her, and then shut his eyes again, turned over and buried his face in the pillow, fingers clenching in the warm cotton. But he could still hear each page as she lifted it, and sometime later put it down, and he could hear the faint scratch of the pen across the last one, her name under his.

No one said anything in the morning, and Cooper never knew who had been the last to read through the list of names and codes, futilely, one by one. Or how the papers had been disposed of, afterward; except that they must have been, since he never saw them again. The monitors didn't say anything about what they'd done, but for a long time afterward Cooper felt vaguely hollow, a strange ache in his chest that he couldn't name, and didn't like.

#   #   #

Cooper was the one of the batch who discovered sex first, with Suzanne. He was half-dozing in a bottom bunk, early one morning before the bell, when across from him she jerked awake with a sharp cry, clutching her leg. A cramp, a bad one, and he rolled out of bed and went to her, pulling the blanket down and urging her hands away from the knot in her calf to massage it himself, carefully firm. Ephraim, above Cooper, had woken at her shout; he looked across, but seeing Cooper already there, he nodded at them and closed his eyes again. Suzanne was gasping with the shock of the sudden pain, but under his hands her breathing eased, and she sighed as the muscle began to loosen. "Umph. Thanks, Cooper."

"Sure." It was a strange thing to say, but they'd heard a natural-born use the word that way in a film the day before, and he was trying it out. It sounded all right. Suzanne was sprawled on her back as he cradled her left leg in his hands, and she made small grunts of relief as he worked the calf muscle back and forth, soothing it, and then moved up to the larger muscles of her thigh. She let her legs fall apart to make room for him to sit between them, and he went back and rubbed her right leg too, from the ankle all the way to her hip. Then he worked his fingers through her pubic hair, the same length as the hair on her head since their haircuts that week, but softer in its curls, and she smiled. "Mm. You know you're the only one who ever massages my scalp? I like it."

"So do I." This was a little like massaging her scalp, the hard bone under short hair, but the bone ended just above her vagina, in folds of soft flesh, and when he touched her clitoris she winced. "Sorry. Did I hurt you?"

"Not really. It's just sensitive, but it feels good. Don't stop." So he didn't, and she murmured in pleasure, and spread her legs wider to make room for him. But he hesitated when he felt her muscles tighten. "What is it?" she asked, opening her eyes.

"You're getting tense again," he pointed out. "This is supposed to relax you."

"Yes, but--" she shrugged. "It feels good. Keep going. Right there..." and she pushed at his fingers, showing him what she meant. It was slippery, her vagina wet with something like sweat--the days had gotten warmer, as the monitors had promised they would, and the sun rose earlier, so that even now, well before the bell, the dormitory was light and warm. There was a smell rising from her that Cooper liked, a combination of regular sweat and the moisture from her crotch, and he worked his fingers the way she wanted, pale pink against the dark pink of her inner skin, and the brown of the outside. His penis was beginning to swell, as it still did sometimes in the mornings, but by now he had no trouble ignoring the odd throbbing until it went away.

Then Suzanne suddenly gasped and all her muscles seemed to cramp, hard, feet kicking out and her shoulders jerking momentarily off the mattress. Cooper snatched his hand away, startled, and grabbed for her legs, trying to ease her through the spasm. "Suzanne! Are you all right?" And from the bunk above Cara leaned around to peer at them, asking sleepily, "Are you two okay?"

Suzanne shuddered, then began to slowly relax back onto the bed. He didn't let go, gentling her down, resting one leg across his own lap and keeping a hand on it. "Yes. I think so," she said.

Cooper rubbed his hands along her thigh. "What happened? Another cramp?" It had looked bad, and now she was a little flushed, breathing hard.

"I don't know. But it didn't hurt. It was--good, actually."

"Good?" For a moment he had thought she might be having a convulsion.

"Like--when you need to sneeze, and you can't, and then finally you do? Like that. Only in my crotch, and my stomach." She looked up at Cara. "Sorry to wake you."

"Just be a little quieter, will you?" Cara liked to sleep as late as she could; she was clearly wishing that she had taken another bunk last night, or that Suzanne had.

"We will. Sorry." Cara disappeared into the blanket again, and Suzanne turned back to Cooper, smiling. "It's all right, Cooper, relax. Actually, I might like to try it again sometime."

"Yeah?" It didn't really sound bad, when she described it like that. "Maybe it's a new massage technique."

"Do you want me to try it on you?"

"Will it work?" he asked doubtfully. He didn't have a clitoris, or anything like her genitals.

"I don't know. But we can try."

So they switched places in the bunk, although the movement made Cara grumble again from above. Across the aisle Ephraim had woken up again as well, and was watching curiously.

Suzanne sat between his legs, looking at his penis dubiously. Her hand was warm, though, when she touched him; that felt good. She began a gentle stroking motion, in little circles, much like what he had done for her, but ranging over the length of his penis instead of staying in one place as he had. Almost immediately it began to swell again, and she paused.

"Should I stop?"

"No." It did feel good. "The monitors said we shouldn't worry about it." So she kept going, a little harder as the flesh beneath her hand firmed. When she pulled curiously at his foreskin he showed her how to peel it back--"carefully!"--and she smiled at him and promised. He caught his breath when her fingers brushed over the sensitive tip the loose skin normally covered. Her other hand scratched through his pubic hair, letting it curl around her fingers.

"I wonder why this hair is always curly, when the hair on your head is straight?"

"It's not always so curly," put in Ephraim. "Erik's pubic hair is almost straight."

"And you're curly in both places!" Cooper told her, smiling.

"Yes, but it usually is...." But she let the subject drop, moving both hands on his penis as it swelled more. "Is this good?"

"Yes." He understood what she had meant; there was a pressure building in his crotch, though not in his stomach, and he could feel his legs tightening. But it did feel good, like the strain just before the barbell began to rise up from his shoulders. "Do it harder." But then she pressed in with her fingers, probing as if for a regular massage, and he yelped and flinched.

"Sorry," she said at once, and stopped. "Not like that?"

"Not like that," he agreed, panting. No wonder the fighting instructors had them wear plastic protective cups. He cupped his hand around hers for a moment. "Don't dig in like that, just--rub, I guess. Only harder."

"This would work better if we had some massage oil," she pointed out. "It was easier with me."

"Try saliva?" Ephraim suggested, and Suzanne spat on her palms, and then rubbed him again. That was definitely better, and he squirmed a little, getting comfortable, and closed his eyes.

After a while Suzanne stopped again. "You're dripping something."

"Well, so did you. Keep going." She snorted softly, but pulled both wet hands in a tight grip the length of his penis, and he caught his breath.

Like needing to sneeze, she'd said, and there was a tense need building in him, something hot and urgent in his crotch, under her hands. And just as with a sneeze, even despite the long buildup he was caught by surprise when the tension burst, and he grunted, hard, as something flared into a burst of release and pleasure, and then a rhythmic pulsing. But even as the first surge faded, Suzanne cried out in horror, and he opened his eyes to find himself--urinating?--no, spurting something thick and whitish from his penis, spraying it onto her hands and his own stomach-- Suzanne jerked away and froze, eyes wide and appalled, and Ephraim had vaulted down beside them, and Cara was gaping at him from above as well, as he struggled up onto his elbows, staring at what had happened.

"Are you all right?" Suzanne demanded, even as Ephraim blurted, "What _is_ that stuff?"

Cooper was out of breath, his heart pounding; the liquid was still pumping from him, more weakly now, two last spurts puddling just above his pubic hair. "I don't know," he managed. "Pus--?" Was he sick, some kind of infection?

"Like when Tony had a boil, and the medic lanced it?" offered Cara, and Suzanne, voice shaking, admitted, "It was really swollen...."

"Does it hurt?" asked Ephraim. Suzanne reached to touch his penis again, and Cooper cried out and flinched away; suddenly even the light touch was painful. She and Ephraim exchanged alarmed glances, and Suzanne shouted, "Monitor!"

That brought the whole batch awake immediately, all who hadn't already been listening and wondering at the commotion. Heads turned, figures sat up and stared from all around the dormitory, but even as the babble of questions began it was hushed by the click of the speaker, and then the monitor's voice. "Yes?"

"What's happened to Cooper?"

They could never hear any expression in the monitors' voices over the speakers. And the response, after a brief pause, wasn't an answer but a command. "Cooper Hawkes and Suzanne Sorenson, report to the main classroom."

If he were sick, he'd have been summoned to the infirmary, wouldn't he? Maybe they were both in trouble; Cooper was more frightened now than before. Suzanne got up from the bunk, and Ephraim helped Cooper pull himself upright. Cooper and Suzanne were both trembling, and he kept hold of Ephraim's hand. "Do you think I should wash it off?" he asked her.

She looked at her hands, flexed her fingers. "It's sticky. The medics might want to take a sample...."

Hesitantly, Cooper touched the smears on his stomach. The stuff smelled sour; wasn't pus sweet? "But we're always supposed to wash in the morning. Before we leave the dormitory. And get dressed," he added.

She looked at him, penis shrunken almost to normal again but his stomach wet and sticky and his pubic hair matted. "It'll be covered by the clothes you're wearing, anyway. Why don't we dress, and I'll wash my hands, but you leave it; that way it isn't visible, but if they want a sample it's there."

That made sense, and Ephraim helped him find clothes for them both while she washed her hands in the bathroom, and brought a comb back for him; her hair didn't need it. He gingerly settled his genitals into the underwear; the hypersensitivity seemed to be fading, but he was still tender there. While the two of them were hurriedly dressing the morning bell finally rang, startling them all; a few of the batch moved hesitantly toward the showers, but Ephraim was still standing among the bunks, watching, as Cooper and Suzanne pulled the door open and hurried down the corridor toward the classroom where the monitor waited for them.

They weren't in trouble, exactly; although the monitor seemed a little angry, they didn't get any demerits, not even a warning. It was like a lesson, except that only the two of them were there, but the monitor said there would be a full lesson on sex soon. That's what he said they had been doing, not a kind of massage, although Cooper thought the two seemed pretty similar. Sex was done with the genitals, and the white spurts of wetness--semen, it was called--were normal, for a male. At that, Cooper blew out a soft breath of relief. The penis swelling was part of it too; the monitor told them that the males' bodies had been reflexively practicing before, until they were able to do it, just as neonates couldn't control their muscles, but spasmed and twitched for the first week until the brain stabilized the nerve connections. But that didn't make sense, because when Cooper asked if he'd be able to control the swelling now, the monitor said no.

But it should be done only in the dormitory, the monitor warned them. It was a recreation, like a wrestling match between batchmates, or like eating something because it tasted good even though you weren't hungry. Then he sent them back to the dormitory to shower and go on to the first morning class. They were late, but when they came into the gymnasium and joined the batch sitting crosslegged in rows on the exercise mat, the monitors supervising the lesson didn't say anything.

Suzanne found a place toward the front, but Ephraim was at the back of the batch, with an empty space next to him, and Cooper sat down in it gratefully. He was always tense, close to a monitor, and he'd never had one talk to him, almost alone, for so long before. He started to listen to the fighting instructor, trying to work out what he'd missed; but then he felt something touch his leg, lightly, through the trousers. Surprised, he glanced down as well as he could, and saw that instead of keeping his hands properly folded in his lap, Ephraim had let his left hand fall to the mat beside him, so that it had brushed against Cooper's knee.

He inhaled sharply, as a warning. What was Ephraim doing? The instructor chose Erik out of the front row to demonstrate something, and as she moved to the right side of the mat, putting Erik on the other, Cooper turned his head to watch her, so that he could see Ephraim out of the corner of his eye. Ephraim had turned in the other direction, but he clearly wasn't looking at Erik, or even listening to the instructor's explanation of what she was going to do; he was looking almost directly at Cooper, and his dark eyes were wide and worried. Cooper glanced nervously past the instructor at the monitor standing against the wall, but Ephraim's hand touched him again, and there was a question in his eyes.

Ephraim was worried about him. So worried that he was willing to risk a warning for not paying attention. Cooper realized it quite suddenly, and almost moved his right hand to touch his batchmate's, before he caught himself. He'd come close enough to trouble already today, even though he still didn't quite understand how. But he shifted his eyes away from the instructor for a moment, and exhaled slowly. Ephraim's forehead creased, and Cooper smiled, trying again to reassure him.

It seemed to work. Ephraim nodded, a small motion, and even as a monitor came up from behind to stand watchfully over them both, he put his hand back in his lap. His eyes slid from Cooper back to Erik, and then he turned his head to look at the instructor.

"Now," she said, and Erik came at her with the flying kick attack they'd learned two days before. She dodged and caught his leg somehow, throwing him onto his stomach in a quick wrenching movement that ended with her knee in the small of his back, her hands twisting his foot up in a way that Cooper could tell would be very painful, if she wanted it to be. She held the position a moment, then let him up. "That's what I mean. Try it for yourselves."

Ephraim and Cooper were split up for the exercise. Neither of them had heard her instructions, and both of them were monitored asking the sparring partners they were assigned what she had said. Cooper flinched contritely at the monitor's warning, but he was still glad to have seen the anxious tension ease in Ephraim's face.

Cooper and Suzanne explained about sex to the batch at lunch, as well as they could. It was hard to describe without being able to show what they meant, and they weren't allowed to do that except in the dormitory. But that evening a number of the batch tried it out, and although it was strange at first, and messy for the males, most of them liked it.

Cooper liked it a lot, once he was used to it. He found that he could sex by himself, rubbing his penis with his own hands; massaging his own muscles was awkward, but sexing himself worked pretty well. But it was more fun to do it with someone else. Besides, sexing himself made him sleepy; after a few days he kept it for after lights-out at night, if he wasn't tired enough to fall asleep easily. Sexing with his batchmates was just the opposite. It was a little tiring, but for the most part it energized him, the way exercising did; it might leave him sweaty and panting, but after a shower he felt alert and wide awake. Ephraim and Suzanne usually woke up early, as he did, and sometimes Tony or Kim as well, and often two or three of them would find each other and sex together before the bell. More than two at a time made it hard to fit on a bunk, and the floor wasn't as comfortable, but at least it didn't wobble the way an upper bunk did sometimes if they were moving around. Once he and Ephraim made so much noise that Cara threw a pillow at them.

The monitor hadn't said anything about different ways to sex, but by the time the lesson he'd promised came, a little over two weeks later, they'd discovered a few more on their own. The males' testicles were sensitive too, although--as the fighting instructor had warned--they were fragile and easily hurt. They'd asked permission to bring some massage oil into the dormitory, and it made the rubbing even better when they used it. Cooper didn't usually need it with Suzanne, but sometimes she wanted him to go on so long that his fingers began to cramp. If Ephraim was with them, the two of them could take turns, and meanwhile one of them could rub the other's penis; that worked out well. Experimenting, they discovered that many of the batch liked having their breasts and nipples rubbed too, although that was more common among the females. Cooper found that he liked to have his nipples pinched, but Suzanne only wanted a light touch, and Ephraim didn't really feel anything in his nipples, although he got to be very good at sexing Cooper's and Suzanne's.

They looked forward to the lesson on sex, curious, but they didn't expect the surprises it brought. The monitor talked to them briefly, repeating what he had told Cooper and Suzanne, and then they were shown a film of natural-born humans, sexing. Except that the monitor's voice in the film, narrating, said that what they were doing was called "making love"; apparently it was different for natural-borns. There were only two of them in the film, one man and one woman, and Cooper was so startled when he saw their navels, puckered holes in the middle of their stomachs, that for a moment he forgot what he was supposed to be paying attention to. He'd known that in-vitros' navels were on the backs of their necks because of the way the gestation tanks were designed, of course, but he'd never thought about the fact that natural-born humans would have them somewhere else, let alone imagined them as holes instead of little raised nubs.

The natural-borns did different things, too. Cooper and his batchmates had sexed the way they massaged, one working on another in turn; but the natural-borns did a lot of it simultaneously. They kissed and licked each other's mouths, and then they rubbed each other's breasts and genitals, and for a lot of it the man rubbed his penis in and out of the woman's vagina. Cooper's eyes widened at that; he'd tried pushing a finger in occasionally, but although Suzanne rather liked it some of the others had winced, and a swollen penis was much bigger than a finger or a tampon.

But that surprise was nothing, compared to the last. At the end, when the natural-borns had finished and were lying curled up together--the bed in the film was much bigger than the bunks the batch slept in--the narrator's voice began talking about a baby. An infant human, conceived by the man and woman as they made love, that would gestate inside the woman and be born out of her: naturally born, not from a tank. A new person, that would be kin to both its parents.

Three of the batch raised their hands as the lights came up afterward. The monitor nodded to Suzanne, sitting just ahead of Cooper and to the right.

"Monitor, if we do that, can we conceive a baby?"

"No." The monitor looked around the room, at the whole batch, and raised his voice. "Only humans, natural-borns, conceive babies. You're in-vitros. You grow in the tanks."

Suzanne's hand was still up. "Monitor? Can we grow babies in the tanks?"

The monitor shook his head. "No. We grow you." He turned toward Erik, and Suzanne folded her arms again. But Cooper could see that she was looking down at the desk, her neck bent, instead of straight ahead. Behind her Ephraim inhaled, but although she flattened her right hand slightly on the desk in response, she didn't look up.

In the front row, Erik was already talking. "Monitor, will the baby have--" he hesitated slightly, before remembering the word-- "siblings?"

"If the parents decide to conceive another one, it will have a sibling. Sometimes two are born at once," the monitor added. "These are called twins; in some cases they are the closest kin of all."

Kin. Cooper wondered again what it was like. Natural-borns could make kin for themselves; the baby the man and woman had conceived in the film would be at the center of a kin diagram like the ones the batch had been shown, linked by genetic similarity to both its parents. Its family.

"Monitor, will the baby live in a facility?" Elyse asked. Cooper tightened his lips in irritation, already knowing the answer even as the monitor told her. Of course not; didn't she remember what the other monitor had said? Kin, close kin, lived together.

Then Suzanne looked up, and raised her hand again. "Monitor? Will we ever--not be monitored?"

"No." The monitor looked at her sharply. "You are in-vitros. To be monitored--"

Cooper recited the lesson with the batch, all together: "--is to be free." But watching Suzanne, he could tell that although her mouth opened, she did not say the words. He sucked in a breath, as loudly as he dared, but she didn't respond. In the front of the room, the monitors moved together, talking briefly among themselves, and he was sure she would be given a warning at least; but when the monitor in charge looked up again, he only dismissed the batch to dinner.

#   #   #

Cooper was eating the chocolate pudding slowly, to make it last, when a monitor came into the dining hall. The members of two-nine-one-seven saw her first, and stopped talking abruptly to scramble into position. The sudden hush from that side of the room alerted Cooper's batch, and they looked up in surprise; those, like Cooper, who had been sitting with their backs to the door quickly reversed the chairs and put their hands in their laps, while the others folded their arms on the tables. It was unusual for monitors to come into the dining hall; once when they were very young Erik and Amalya had wanted to practice opportunistic fighting during breakfast, and had started snatching up food and silverware to use as weapons, and the monitors had arrived and given the whole batch demerits. Usually, if the monitors wanted to tell them something outside of lessons, they would call over the ceiling speakers.

The monitor walked past two-nine-one-seven, not even warning them for the sloppy postures they'd taken, and came to a halt, surveying the older batch. "Suzanne Sorenson."

Suzanne stood up. Was she going to be punished after all?

"We have monitored a medical problem," the monitor said. "You need treatment. Come with me."

Cooper couldn't help glancing quickly at Suzanne. She looked fine; she hadn't felt ill, had she? But the monitors would know. It must be bad, for one to come in person rather than sending for her.

But Suzanne didn't move. "Monitor," she asked, "what kind of problem?" Cooper tensed; behind him, two batchmates inhaled audibly. The monitor's eyes narrowed.

"We will provide treatment." Her voice was curt. "Come with me. Now." She led Suzanne out of the dining hall, and the door shut firmly behind them. Almost immediately, the younger batch began eating again, and on that side of the room the low murmur of conversation resumed. Cooper turned back to the table and traded worried looks with Ephraim; they exhaled slowly, together. He ate another bite of pudding, but it didn't taste as good as it had before.

Suzanne was not back in time for the evening lesson, but that wasn't surprising. A problem severe enough for a monitor to have fetched her would hardly be treated that quickly. Cooper stayed in the dormitory during the free hour, but when Erik turned the lights out and the batch went to sleep, she still hadn't returned.

He woke early, the first one up, and as he remembered he sat up and craned to see the bunk that had been empty when the lights were put out. It still was, the blanket as flat and undisturbed as Paolo had left it the morning before. He swung himself down and went into the toilets, but she wasn't there; the shower room was dark and silent but he looked in anyway. He even opened the door and looked up and down the hallway, although they weren't allowed to leave the dormitory before the bell. She wasn't anywhere. Ephraim was awake now too, and they got into a bunk and sexed for a little while, but they were both worried, and Cooper couldn't finish.

She wasn't at breakfast, or in the morning lessons either. Cooper almost asked one of the monitors when they would be finished treating her, but he was afraid they would think he wasn't paying attention to the instructor. Demerits might mean he'd be sent to the isolation cell, and he was afraid to be alone. And the more time that went by without any mention of Suzanne, the more frightened for her he became. She must have had to sleep in the infirmary, the night before. Alone, as if she were being punished. At lunch Ephraim sat next to him, and they didn't talk; but they pressed their bodies together, Ephraim's leg and shoulder hard against his, through the whole half-hour.

The afternoon lesson was on ramscoop engine maintenance, but as they filed into the classroom two monitors were talking to the instructor. One of them was the one who had come for Suzanne, and he almost flinched when he saw her, but with an effort he managed to find a seat and fold his arms properly. When the whole batch had sat down, the instructor and the other monitor stepped back against the wall. She came forward.

"Suzanne Sorenson is dead," she said.

It was as though someone had punched him, hard, in the stomach. He thought he made a sound, but he couldn't have, because the monitor was still talking. "Her medical problem was uncorrectable. This occasionally happens."

Dead. Cooper knew that in-vitros sometimes died. Two-nine-one-seven had been born early, when his own batch was only ten months old, because so many of them were aborting in the gestation tanks, and four more had died in the cribs during the week that three-four-three-nine had tended them; there were only thirty-three in that batch now, where three-four-three-nine had forty-eight, and three-two-seven-four, gone months ago now to their work placements, had had over fifty. And two of that older batch had died in training, when a badly-set drill charge collapsed part of the mine workings. Some of Cooper's own batch had died in the cribs, too, he knew, but he didn't remember them; he'd been too young. But Suzanne-- He raised a hand, and the monitor nodded permission.

"Monitor, what was her medical problem?" It was hard to talk, with his stomach cramping.

"She had a malignant tumor in the left hemisphere of her brain."

In her brain? "She seemed healthy...." He trailed off as Ephraim inhaled beside him.

The monitor glanced at the lesson projected on the screen. "Sometimes when you are calculating engine fuel conversion ratios, you make an error, but you do not see it. If the error is uncorrected, the ship will explode. You must examine the calculations, erase the error, and correct it.

"You are lucky, because you are in-vitros. We monitor you for errors, like the one in Suzanne Sorenson's brain. Unfortunately, some errors cannot be corrected."

Cooper lowered his arm, slowly, and laid it back down, hand pressed to his opposite elbow. His shoulders were trembling, but if he kept perfectly still, maybe the monitors wouldn't warn him. He didn't feel very lucky.

Suzanne probably didn't feel very lucky.

Suzanne didn't feel anything at all. Suzanne was dead.

What good was erasing an error, if it couldn't be corrected?

Cooper thought about that all through the lesson. He didn't look at the equations and diagrams the instructor flashed on the screen, or listen to his voice explaining them. In the last hour, when the practice problems were distributed and the rest of the batch began working them, he left the paper on the desk before him, not touching it. When Ephraim inhaled again, sharply, he only flattened his hand on the desk in response. He didn't move until a monitor warned him. Then he picked the sheet up and looked at it, and put it down again.

"You can't do the exercise," the monitor said.

"No."

"You were not paying attention."

"No. Monitor, I feel ill." He did; he was still shivering, and his stomach ached dully.

The monitor studied him, then jerked his head toward the door. "One demerit for inattention. Go back to the dormitory and lie down."

He got up and walked, unsteadily, between the desks to the door. Ephraim blew out a puff of breath as he passed, and Cooper trailed his hand along the desk beside his batchmate. He already had a demerit anyway.

He had never been alone in the dormitory before. It was eerily quiet, and the shuddering rasp of his breath only made it worse, none of his batchmates breathing with him. He lay down in the bunk that had been empty the night before, the one Suzanne should have been in.

He didn't feel sick, not really. But he couldn't seem to catch his breath; his chest and throat were cramping, squeezing tight, and his eyes were watering, as if he had touched his bare skin to a welding iron, or a sparring partner had kicked him in the testicles, unprotected.

The monitors had erased Suzanne. The place where she had been was as blank as the problem sheet he had left behind him on the desk.

But she had been ill, they said. Defective. They'd monitored her; if she'd had a tumor in her brain, then she was dying. Like the neonates who had shuddered in the cribs and then gone limp, not breathing, cooling slowly. The monitors would arrive to take the corpses away. They monitored everything. They always knew.

"Monitor?" Cooper whispered, very quietly. "Can you hear me?"

There was no answer. He took the pillow from the bed and went to a window, hugging the cushion tightly to his stomach as he craned up to stare out between the bars. In the sky above the distant buildings of the human city a bird was circling, high and alone against the blue. Alone, like Suzanne had been when she died. He watched it for a long time.

To be monitored is to be free. The monitors had said so.

They said the batch would always be monitored.

Did anyone monitor the birds?

He slept for a while, finally, still curled around the pillow. When he woke, the striped patches of sunlight from the windows had shifted and thinned to slivers on the far wall, and he stumbled a little, groggy, as he pushed himself up and went to use the toilet. As he came back into the bunkroom the speaker clicked on, and a monitor's voice told him to report to the evening lesson. He must have slept through dinner.

Ephraim threw him a quick, frightened glance, even turning his head a little, when he came into the classroom and sat down. He tried to breathe out, tried to reassure him, but the air was caught in his throat, and he couldn't. He folded his arms properly on the desk and pressed both hands flat, looking at the screen; but he was still thinking about the bird, so deep in the sky, and about Suzanne. And the monitors didn't even warn him. It was as if they couldn't tell that he was ignoring the lesson.

He wanted to know. He knew he was risking the isolation cell when he raised his hand; if somehow he hadn't been monitored already, the question made it obvious that he hadn't been paying attention, and there was one demerit marked against him already. But he wanted to know.

"Monitor? Who monitors the birds?"

The monitor looked a little surprised at the interruption, a little angry. "I monitor the birds," he told Cooper, levelly.

But that didn't make sense. How could the monitors know what the bird was doing, or thinking, so far up in the sky? How could they know if it was ill?

His hand was shaking as he lowered it, and his stomach hurt again. If everything was monitored...or not.... "Who monitors you?"

But the monitor didn't answer. He straightened up and exchanged glances with another one, standing to the side of the classroom; and then he turned away and went back to the lesson. Without answering the question. And he didn't give Cooper another demerit, or even a warning; and none of the monitors stopped him from going back to the dormitory together with his batchmates. All except Suzanne.

He stayed close by Ephraim as they walked across the grounds, back to the dormitory. The batch was almost silent through the free hour, and Ephraim sat next to him on a bunk, leaning wordlessly against him, until it was time to go to sleep.

In the chill silence of the night he woke up and lay still, his eyes open; the clock over the door washed faint, pallid light across the sleeping bodies of the batch. He needed, distantly, to urinate, and after a while he got up and went to do it, holding his penis, remembering Suzanne. Coming back from the toilets he went to a window and looked out again: black, not blue, and the stars were cold sharp points of light, so remote. He turned away and got back into bed.

In the next bunk, Ephraim was awake. He knew, even as he felt the crackle of paper under the pillow, and he unfolded the note clumsily and read it, squinting a little in the dimness.

_I heard the monitors talking yesterday._ The lines were uneven; he must have written it in the dark. While Cooper was in the bathroom, maybe.

_There was talk of eliminating the program._ He didn't understand that; the only programs he knew were the ones in the computers, that they studied from. But he knew what the last two lines meant.

_You are considered 'defective.' You are to be 'erased.'_ Ephraim had underlined the last word, so hard that the point of the pen had gone through the paper at the end of the stroke.

Cooper crumpled the note between his hands, numbly, and stared at his batchmate. Ephraim looked back at him, dark eyes wide; they were both trembling. Cooper could hardly breathe.

Then the door opened with a creak that grated in his stomach, and he looked up past Ephraim, toward the sound. A monitor stood there, a black silhouette against the sudden light from the corridor.

"We've monitored the onset of a head cold," he said. "We've scheduled an examination and treatment." For a moment Cooper didn't move, and the monitor's voice sharpened. "Now."

Ephraim's face was turned away from the door. He watched, motionless, as Cooper got dressed, blinked once when he palmed the note and hid it in the pillowcase as he sat down to tie the shoes. As Cooper walked past him toward the door, toward the waiting monitor, he heard his batchmate blow out a long breath against the pillow, a whispering sigh of helpless comfort. Cooper knew.

He knew. He knew, and somehow it still surprised him, jerked him around to block the knife and he didn't know what to do so he did what he'd been taught, and the monitor coughed blood and died, and he fled. Out of the infirmary, out of the facility, lost from his batch and alone into the alien night.


	2. interlude: nightmare

The human city was a terrifying, frantic tumult. None of the lessons had prepared him for the crowds of natural-borns swarming the streets, the shouts in languages he didn't know, the careening traffic and smells and no-one to answer questions, to tell him where to find food or clothing or a toilet, and none of his batch anywhere. He had never, in his whole life, spent more than a few hours separated from his batchmates. For two days he cringed in a filthy alley, afraid to move, terrified that the monitors would come for him--how could they not know where he was?--and desperately hoping, at times, that they would.

But the more time that passed--time in which they didn't find him, didn't monitor him, didn't seem to know anything about him--the less he hoped, despite everything, to look up to find a monitor standing over him, blocking the little sun that filtered down between the grimy stone of the alley walls. He got hungry, and worse than hungry, but on the third day, by watching what the natural-borns did, he found a place that served food, and when he remembered that he needed money he took some from a human who made the mistake of walking through the alley he was crouched in. He had assumed that all of them would be as skilled as the fighting instructor, whom none of his batch had ever been able to throw; but the monitor hadn't been, and this one wasn't either.

Slowly, he learned to survive. He found that his navel attracted stares and gibes, and often worse things, and he bought a shirt with a high collar, and was glad when his hair grew longer than it had ever been, covering his neck. He listened to the way the people talked around him and imitated them as well as he could: new words, new tones to his voice, although he didn't always know what they meant. Sometimes it was enough, though, and he could get a little work, black-market jobs where they didn't care enough to ask too many questions. Questions were dangerous; the first thrown rock had taught him how most humans felt about in-vitros. Sometimes he stole. He slept in the corner of an abandoned building, where he could keep the few things he needed: a jacket and a blanket, some food. His money and his knife never left his pockets. He never saw another in-vitro, and no one monitored him.

"America loves you," they had taught him. "Some day you will return her love."

He returned it, fiercely, as he found it.


	3. USMC Space Aviator Recruit Depot, Loxley, AL

The sun was glaringly bright, and the orange prison overall stuck to Cooper's sweaty back and buttocks as the MPs brought the truck to a jolting stop, a few hundred yards onto the base. He jerked angrily as they wrenched his arms, hauling him down out of the back, but he was glad when they stripped the manacles off his wrists. Then they shoved him toward a red-faced sergeant, who stopped yelling at the couple of dozen natural-borns lined up in front of him long enough to eye Cooper up and down. The ones in line weren't wearing uniforms, and two of them, a man and a woman, were doing push-ups; Cooper glanced at them briefly, and at the other soldiers. All of the soldiers were armed. Then he stared coldly past them all, to the guard post at the gate. He might have to be a Marine, but he didn't have to like it.

The sergeant strode up, leaning in toward Cooper and pushing his face close; Cooper stoically refused to pull back. The sergeant's nametag said "Bougus," and he was clearly the one in charge. His breath smelled sour. "I know all about you, Hawkes," he drawled.

Another natural-born lie; it wasn't even worth answering. None of them knew all about him. Not even the monitors had, although they had wanted the batch to think they did. Cooper'd found out that lie when he'd escaped, leaving the one who'd tried to kill him sprawled on the infirmary floor, still gaping in blank surprise. And none of the natural-borns he'd seen since then knew even as much as the monitors had, no matter what they claimed. These days they usually didn't even realize what he was until he said something wrong, or they got a look at the back of his neck. And if the cops had known all about him, they'd have charged him with killing the monitor. Instead it had just been aggravated assault, for going after the three natural-borns who'd found him out and tried to hang him, and something else for smashing up the police car when the cops had gotten in his way and tried to arrest him. Cooper didn't figure this one would know any more about him than the cops had; Bougus didn't scare him.

Sergeant Bougus waited a moment, and then sneered. "So the judge thought it would be cute to sentence a tank to the military."

Cooper didn't think so. Nobody'd said anything about cute. He'd been glad, though, when the judge had announced his decision; the Marines had definitely sounded better than jail. He'd heard about jail from some of the people he'd worked with, or met on the streets, and he knew he didn't want to go there.

"I fought alongside you people in the AI War," the sergeant told him. "So I know that tanks are lazy, and they don't care about anyone or anything."

Cooper was tired of hearing about how in-vitros hadn't wanted to fight in the AI War. He hadn't even been born then, but a lot of humans yelled at him about it anyway, like it was his fault or something. Including the bastards who'd slung a chain around his neck and hauled him up by it, choking and kicking, a week or so ago. He didn't give a damn about any wars humans had fought with machines, but he wasn't going to say so now; if he got thrown out of the Marines they'd send him to jail after all, and the judge had said it would be worse for him, then, than if he'd just gone straight there.

But the sergeant was still glaring at him, and he'd learned a lot, over the years, about how to talk to humans. Stuff the monitors would probably have killed him for, if they could have. He answered, flatly, "I won't let you down."

Sergeant Bougus screamed at him. The noise hurt his ears, but he shrugged and did as he was ordered, lowering himself to the tarmac and beginning to count off fifty pushups. The others who had been doing them, the two natural-borns, must have gotten Bougus mad at them too. It was a strange kind of punishment, though. When he finished, one of the soldiers shoved him into line with the other recruits; he stared forward, slouching a little, listening to the tirade and responding when he had to. Most of it was just abuse, but there was some information he'd need to get along here; he memorized it and ignored the rest. So far this didn't seem too bad.

Eventually the sergeant finished yelling and marched them all rapidly across the base, past a row of planes being serviced by ground crew--Cooper saw several of the others staring after them as they went by--and into a tall white building for a confusing series of physical examinations, followed by a rapid explanation of the camp's layout. They were given new clothes, what he supposed was the Marine uniform; they smelled better than the prison jumpsuit, and he pulled them on gladly. A pile of equipment followed: washing stuff and a towel, mess kit, first-aid kit, some tools he wasn't sure of--and a rifle. Different from the weapons he'd trained with in the facility, heavy and solid in his hands as he turned it over, studying it. Four and a half years he'd spent on the streets. If he'd had this.... Then they were all shoved toward yet another building, this one long and low, and told to be ready for evening chow--whatever that was--in twenty minutes.

Cooper went through the doorway and stopped abruptly, staring. It was a dormitory. Barracks, they'd called it, but it was more like the room he'd slept in in the facility than anywhere he'd been since. Two rows of double bunks down the long room, with the brownish-grey blankets he remembered; the lockers stood in pairs between the beds, instead of grouped by the door, but they were just the same too. The natural-borns milled around the room, tossing the bundles they were carrying into lockers and talking loudly to each other. The noise jarred Cooper's head more than Bougus's yelling had; he remembered the soft murmur of his batchmates' voices, all sleeping together in beds like these, and the longing ache twisted in his belly. He gritted his teeth and swallowed against it. A couple of the humans were staring at him, and he glared back and forced himself to move, to find a locker that hadn't been filled yet and put his gear away. But he kept his back to the wall while he did it. He was alone here, trapped with the natural-borns.

And one of them was coming up to stand in front of him, shifting his weight a little from one foot to the other. "Hi," he said. "My name's Mike Pagodin."

Cooper watched him warily. He still couldn't always figure out human expressions; the man was smiling, but there was something tight, maybe angry, around his eyes. His voice was level enough, though. When Cooper didn't say anything, he spread his hands a little and added, "You can call me Pags."

This one wasn't a threat. "Cooper Hawkes," he said neutrally.

"Where're you from?"

"Philadelphia." In fact, this was the first time he'd ever left the city. He'd been fascinated by the countryside he'd been able to glimpse through the train window, but the police officer by his side hadn't let him look around much.

Pags reached out and caught a woman's arm as she went by, drawing her toward the pair of them. "This is Vanessa Damphousse; Phousse, this is Cooper Hawkes." And to Cooper, as if it meant something, "Phousse and I met on the bus here, so I guess I know her best of everyone."

Damphousse--Phousse--was thin, and almost as dark as Suzanne had been. But Suzanne would never have looked at him with those narrowed eyes. They all knew what he was; Sergeant Bougus had called him a tank right when he'd arrived, and if any of them hadn't heard it, the others would have told them. But Pags and Damphousse weren't going to jump him, anyway, at least not now. Phousse even looked a little scared. Good. He pulled away from the two of them and went to investigate the door he could see at the back of the room. His skin itched as he walked past the other natural-borns, but they were mostly talking to each other and ignoring him, as far as he could tell.

As he'd hoped, once through the door he found toilet stalls on the left, and he used one with relief. The MPs had kept him handcuffed and under guard all the way from the train station, and wouldn't let him piss. On the right was a concrete-floored shower room, three freestanding poles with four showerheads projecting from each, and a row of hooks on the wall. He sucked a breath through his teeth and clenched a fist briefly, angry at himself for the flicker of fear that came with the increasing familiarity of the place. So it looked a lot like the dormitory at the facility. That didn't mean there were monitors here. He'd never seen one since he'd escaped, and when he'd asked a few natural-borns, early on--before he'd realized that the question was dangerous, that it marked him out as not one of them--they hadn't even seemed to know what he meant.

No monitors, and none of his batchmates either. Just a bunch of humans. Two of them came into the shower room and hesitated, falling abruptly silent, when they saw him, and he was glad to feel them flinch as he brushed past them on his way out. Then the whole lot of them were called outside and marched down to the mess hall for chow. Dinner.

The food was good, hot and filling, and he could eat as much as he wanted. He'd been hungry a lot; he filled his plate three times, and ate until he could feel his stomach bulging against the belt of his new trousers. But even the meal was disorienting: the long tables they sat at, the crowd around him; they were louder and more aggressive than his batchmates had ever been, and he was still edgy at being surrounded by them like this when they all knew what he was, but just the press of bodies on all sides brought up memories. It was worse in the barracks that night, in the dark with the humans quiet at last, just breathing as they slept. The sound was too familiar, too comfortable; it slipped past his gritted teeth and squeezed-shut eyes, lulling him to sleep.

He was jolted awake when the lights exploded in searing glare, and Sergeant Bougus was screaming "Up! Up! Get up, you lazy assholes!" as someone grabbed him and threw him bodily out of bed; he blocked and twisted, clawing for the man's eyes, but someone else slammed a fist into the back of his head and he staggered and tried to protect himself from the next blow. But they were already gone, not following up their advantage but moving on to the man and woman in the next bunks, one grabbing the woman by the hair and hauling her yelling from the tangle of blanket and the other leaning over the man cowering in the lower bunk, screaming abuse into his face. Cooper hunched defensively, trying to catch his breath and figure out what the hell was going on, but Sergeant Bougus was ordering them to get dressed, get their uniforms on and fall in, goddammit! He didn't know what "fall in" meant, but he dragged his clothes on and followed the crowd as they tumbled outside and lined up raggedly in the dark; it was past midnight, he could tell, but not yet dawn.

Apparently they'd been woken up for physical training. He couldn't see what the point of all the yelling was, though. They were formed into a column and made to run, past the buildings and onto a narrow road winding through the surrounding hills. He had lost some of his strength and endurance living on the streets, and by the time the sun was edging into the sky and they were allowed to stop and rest he was panting hard; but at that he was much better off than most of the natural-borns. Pags, who had spoken to him the night before, was doubled over and gagging, his fleshy face scarlet, and some of the others looked ready to pass out. They were given twenty minutes of rest, and then ordered out again, a little more slowly, back to the base; once there, they were told, they could shower and eat. "Then," roared Sergeant Bougus, "your day begins!"

The rest of the day was lessons: packing and carrying all the gear they'd been issued, a long list of rules to memorize, how to march and stand and salute. Most of it was easy enough, but everything here was so much louder and more rushed than lessons in the facility had been. The monitors and instructors had never yelled. He didn't like the shouting, but since it went on no matter what he and the natural-borns did, he ignored it. It seemed stupid to him, and he glared at the sergeants when he could, and concentrated on learning what they taught him, and on remembering the names of the rest of his platoon when the sergeants called on them. They were called instructors here, too, drill instructors, but as far as Cooper could tell they taught everything.

It didn't end until late that night, after two hours' drill in how to march in time. He was exhausted by the time they were ordered--loudly--back to barracks, and he collapsed thankfully on the first available bunk and closed his eyes, ignoring the others for the moment. Soon he'd get up to wash and undress, but right now all he wanted to do was lie flat and feel the burning leach out from his muscles.

But then someone was standing over him, and he opened his eyes. It was West, the tall pale one. His jaw was clenched, and he was glaring; Cooper came up on one elbow warily, shifting his weight so that he could pound his boot into West's groin if he needed to, or kick himself back and away. None of them had said much to him all day, and the DIs had yelled at the others as much as they did at him; they called him "tank" and "wetbrain," but they called the rest of them names as well, "fat boy" and "slanteye" and other things. He'd begun to relax a little. But he'd seen expressions like West's on natural-borns' faces before, usually just before they attacked him. If West came at him he'd have to take the natural-born down fast, before the others got the idea to join in. One on one he had no doubt that he could defend himself--he'd been watching all of them, and West hadn't moved or handled himself as though he had any idea how to fight--but he was alone in a room full of natural-borns, and if they all came at him at once he'd be dead. He held himself ready, watching West's face and hands.

But West didn't try to hit him, only snapped, "You're in my bunk."

Cooper blinked, surprised. Then he slid a quick glance around, and realized that the bed he had fallen onto was the one West had slept in the night before.

"Get out of my bunk, nipple-neck." West's eyes narrowed, and Cooper saw his fingers tighten.

It wasn't worth fighting about, not if he didn't have to. Not when he couldn't get away afterward. He had to sleep in the barracks, among them, and he'd be vulnerable then. Better to let the natural-born have the bunk; it wasn't like Cooper wanted to sleep in it, anyway. He levered himself up and walked away, aware behind himself of West straightening the blanket in short, jerky motions. A lot of the other natural-borns were on or near the bunks they'd had before, he saw; maybe they were supposed to stay in the same one, the way the clothes he'd been issued were apparently for his use only. It was a good thing he'd made sure to get an upper bunk the night before, then. He hauled himself into it, scowling sourly at them all. The hell with them, anyway.

On his way back from the showers the next morning he saw Damphousse, standing by her bunk, staring at him as he walked past her to get his clothes. When he met her look she twisted her face a little, one of those natural-born expressions he still couldn't read well. But it wasn't a dangerous one; it was something a little like a smile, and a shrug. "It's true," she said, sounding almost surprised. "You really don't have a navel."

She was looking at the smooth skin of his stomach. Normally he kept it hidden, but there wasn't any point when they all knew already anyway. She didn't seem afraid any more, but she wasn't threatening either, only curious, so he shrugged back and answered her. "I have a navel." It was what usually gave him away, when his hair blew aside, or fell away as he bent over.

Another one--Wang--was sitting on an upper bunk across the aisle, dangling his legs. "You may have a navel, Hawkes, but you sure don't have a belly-button!" he called down, and laughed. Damphousse laughed too, looking from Cooper to Wang and back. Cooper stiffened warily, not sure how they meant it; sometimes, on the streets, laughter had led to other things. He shifted out from between them, automatically slinging his towel over his neck, and moved toward his locker. But Damphousse followed him, coming up to stand at his shoulder.

"I didn't mean anything by that, Hawkes," she said, almost hesitantly. "It's just different, that's all."

He studied her. She wasn't laughing any more, and it hadn't really been the dangerous kind of laughter, anyway. Cooper'd met a few humans who'd been friendly, sometimes, even when they knew what he was. He nodded at her. If he made friends with them, they'd be less likely to jump him some night; maybe she'd help, if West and the others tried something. And it was lonely, without any friends, and his batchmates long gone.

She was smiling at him now, like she was waiting for him to say something. He'd always wondered, so he asked.

"Yours look strange," he said, and gestured toward her stomach, under her t-shirt. "Like holes. Don't they hurt?"

"No," she told him, and from above Wang added, "They're not all holes. Mine's an outie." He didn't know what that meant, so Wang came down and showed him; his navel was a small lump in the middle of his belly, more like Cooper's than like Damphousse's except for its bizarre placement. And both of them were talking to him now, smiling. When the sergeants came shouting the three of them fell into line together, and he felt a little more comfortable.

They were set to field-stripping their rifles that morning, with the DIs shouting at them to work faster--did they think they'd have time to piss around if their weapon jammed in the middle of a firefight? The M590 mechanism was different from the ones Cooper had drilled with before, a newer model, but it was simple enough; he disassembled it and put it back together quickly, and then again while the natural-borns were still floundering as if they'd never touched a rifle before. Wang was next to him, and he was trembling as he fumbled with the firing system. Cooper had noticed already that he cringed every time the sergeants yelled. Now his hands were shaking so that he couldn't even grip the cotter pin, and Sergeant Bougus was bearing down on them. Cooper watched him, and when the sergeant stopped to bend over a woman a few places from them he reached over to Wang's rifle, wiped away the excess oil the human had smeared over the bolt, and slid the pin into alignment. Wang looked up at him, startled, and stammered in a whisper, "Thanks, man." Cooper shrugged and smiled at him. Some of them weren't so bad; maybe he really could be friends with them.

But the strangeness kept betraying him. Damphousse, who had seemed friendly enough in the morning, wouldn't look at him that night. They'd been sent to practice belly-crawling all evening, worming their way forward through the mud under simulated gunfire, and eating cold reconstituted rations in a hastily scraped-out pit before doing it again to get back; they'd all gone straight for the showers when they got to barracks, Cooper along with the rest, and he hadn't sensed any real hostility from any of them. But later, when the natural-borns were sitting talking on their bunks, or writing letters, some of them--to their kin? he wondered--he saw Damphousse look at him, and then turn away sharply. He took a step toward her, and she walked away; beyond her he could see the short tough woman, Vansen, eyeing him with something like disgust.

Maybe they'd decided not to make friends with the tank after all. The hell with them, then, he thought sourly. He could get along just fine without being friends with natural-borns, so long as he didn't have to worry about them smashing his skull in while he slept, and none of them seemed that dangerous. Maybe they didn't have the guts. He stifled the memory of the tentative warmth in his stomach when Damphousse and Wang had smiled at him, and went to his locker, jerking it open and grabbing the first thing he saw, at random. It was the first-aid kit, and he sorted rapidly and cursorily through it, but he barely saw the bandage scissors and alcohol swabs in his hands. Behind him he could hear the natural-borns, keeping away.

But one was coming close, coming up beside him. Cooper swung quickly around; it was Wang. The human leaned against the upper bunk, an arm's length from Cooper, and smiled--not as widely as they usually did, showing their teeth. It looked harmless enough. "Look," he said, "you should put some clothes on."

"What?"

"Well, you're-- It makes some of the women uncomfortable. You standing around naked like that."

Cooper stared at him. Wang seemed to be acting friendly again, but he wasn't making much sense. "We just got out of the shower. Everybody was naked there! Besides, they'll turn the lights out soon. What's the point of getting dressed?" Wang was in his uniform trousers, and he'd seen Damphousse and some of the others pulling on underwear and t-shirts; Pags had a towel wrapped around his waist. But Cooper'd never liked sleeping in clothes; he'd had to a lot in Philadelphia, but it was warm enough in the barracks. And if the sergeants woke them up in the middle of the night again, well, they'd given them time to get dressed before. He'd take his chances. Besides, he was still a little wet from the shower, and he'd dry faster naked.

"Look," said Wang, "in the showers it's different. Even just coming out of them, yeah, it's all right. But--standing around for this long.... It makes people uncomfortable, okay? I'm just trying to help!" His voice was rising.

"Well, how long, then?" asked Cooper angrily. Maybe they didn't want to have to look at his unmarked stomach. Well, he thought theirs looked deformed.

"I can't give you a time limit!" Wang retorted. "It's not like there's a rule!"

Cooper threw the kit back into his locker, and saw Wang flinch when he slammed it shut. "Look," he said, low and fierce, "I'm a tank, okay? A wetbrain. I don't know this stuff. Now tell me how long!"

Wang had backed up a step. "Uh--three minutes. Just don't be naked longer than three minutes. Okay?"

"Fine," Cooper snapped, and Wang backed up another step, and then practically ran away. Cooper grabbed some underwear and a t-shirt and yanked them on, then got into bed and rolled onto his stomach, his fists clenched. Wang had made up the time, that was obvious. For the tank. He was pretty sure some of the others had stayed naked longer than three minutes--but they were human.

Within a few days, the natural-borns began sticking things on the walls over their beds. Pictures, mostly, but Damphousse put postcards up with the pictures against the wall, so that she could read what her friends, and sometimes her family, had written. Whenever a new one arrived, she would read it and then carefully put it up by the others. West had a picture of himself and his two brothers, all hugging each other, and he wore a photo locket showing him with a woman who was either a friend or another of his kin. Cooper wasn't sure which one she was, and he didn't bother asking; West had made his feelings about tanks clear right from the beginning, and Cooper didn't like him any better. Wang had sports pictures, mostly, and Vansen had photographs of her sisters and her parents. He went over to her rack, once, when she wasn't there, and looked at them. Her kin. The sisters looked like her, although not exactly; so they weren't twins, then. He thought they might be younger than she was, but he couldn't be sure.

He had nothing to put on the wall. No kin, no family. No friends. He wondered, as he had for a long time, where his batchmates were. Was Ephraim working in a mine somewhere, as the monitors had told them most of the batch would be placed? Was Cara someplace where she could sleep as late as she wanted?

Unless Ephraim had been monitored leaving the note for him. If they had monitored that--Cooper still wasn't sure whether the monitors had seen everything that happened in the dormitory, but the batch had always assumed they could--then Ephraim was probably dead. Like Suzanne. Like he would have been.

He wasn't monitored any more; they had lied about that, when Suzanne had asked. It was better, here, than in the facility, or even on the streets. But he was alone, always, among the natural-borns.

He found a magazine in the base PX, and when he saw what was in it he bought it with some of the money they told him he was earning. Most of it was taken to pay the fine the judge had given him, as well as making him join the Marines. But even what was left was still more than he had usually been able to earn, working occasional black-market jobs; the paymaster had explained how a bank account worked, and helped him open one. The magazine was a collection of photographs, pictures of landscapes and of strange-looking animals and plants. But on one page was a photograph of a bird, small and alone in an empty sky. It wasn't the kind he had watched through the bars of the dormitory window, but he tore the picture out, and taped it on the blank wall above his pillow. In the mornings, before reveille, he could turn his head and watch it, imagining that the bird was still flying, that at any moment it would move.

#   #   #

After a couple of weeks the pre-dawn roustings mostly stopped, and sometimes they had a little free time in the evenings. Pags and some of the others, Damphousse and Vansen and West and others, liked to go to the base's bar, to talk and drink the beer that was all recruits like them were allowed to buy. Sometimes Pags, or Damphousse, invited him along. He didn't like strong alcohol--he'd gotten drunk a couple of times in Philadelphia, with people who didn't realize what he was and wanted to be friendly, and the loss of control, the way his fingers and his tongue wouldn't do what he wanted, frightened him. And he never knew what to say in the conversations, if someone tried to get him to join in. But he went with them, usually, if they asked. He'd learned that it was better to fit in, as well as he could; they seemed to like him better when he came along. And the beer wasn't bad, and it was weak.

They were there one night, seven or eight of them making the most of the last half hour before curfew. Cooper was listening to Wang and Pags talking about baseball--he knew enough to follow the conversation, mostly--when Vansen suddenly looked up and straightened in her seat. He turned with the others, wondering what she was staring at, and saw a new group entering. The human noise of the place hushed a little as they came in, and Wang saw his curiosity and whispered to him, "The 127th Airborne. The Angry Angels." The Angels wore a different uniform, all black, with caps on their heads and ribbons on their chests; Cooper already knew what those meant. "Best pilots in the service," Wang told him. "Vansen's planning on being one of them someday. Leaving us grunts behind." But he was smiling as he said it.

The Angels claimed a table and pulled their chairs around it with an easy, confident arrogance, ignoring the rest of the room; but Cooper had seen something, and he kept watching them, closely. One of them was different from the others. Not in what he did, or what he was wearing; but he moved differently. His arms didn't swing out awkwardly the way the others' did, the way most of the natural-borns Cooper had ever seen had moved--except the monitors, some of them, and the fighting instructor. This one talked to the other Angels without pulling his face into the exaggerated grimaces of the natural-borns.

Vansen saw him staring. "The one on the end?" Cooper nodded jerkily, not taking his eyes from the group. "That's Major McQueen," she told him. "He's an in-vitro." Around the table, the other recruits started, and some of them glanced quickly between him and the Angel across the room.

Cooper barely noticed, breathless with stunned fascination. An in-vitro. He had never seen another one since he had left the facility, drowning in the crowds of natural-borns. Major McQueen was much older than he was, older than three-two-seven-four had been. He couldn't remember what any of that batch had looked like, although he could still see Suzanne and Ephraim in his dreams; he hadn't ever looked closely enough at the older ones, not after two-nine-one-seven had been born. But now he stared, forgetting his beer, and ignoring whatever Vansen and the others were saying around him. And across the room one of the Angels leaned over and murmured something to Major McQueen, and the other in-vitro looked up, and saw him staring. Cooper tensed, hot and cold all at once; but McQueen smiled at him. Smiled, and nodded, and then turned back to his squad. Cooper's palms were sweaty; he wanted Major McQueen to turn around, look at him again.

He jumped when Vansen touched his shoulder, and jerked his head around. "He saw you, didn't he?" she asked. She only seemed curious, but West's eyes on him held a different expression: something angrier, that he didn't like. He didn't want to talk to them, but Vansen was waiting for an answer, and Major McQueen had turned away.

"Yeah."

West grunted. "You--" he audibly didn't say 'tanks'-- "in-vitros stick together, don't you?"

"Knock it off, West," Vansen snapped. "For God's sake, McQueen barely looked at him."

"Yes, he did!" protested Cooper, stung into answering before he thought. Then he caught himself, and added a little more quietly, "He smiled at me." He wished he'd smiled back, but he'd been too shaken to do it, until it was too late.

"Huh. Must have been some kind of secret tank smile, 'cause I sure as hell didn't see it," West said curtly. Cooper glowered back and turned away, ignoring both of them to gaze across the room, cradling the memory of McQueen's face.

A secret tank smile. He knew West had meant it as an insult. But Major McQueen had smiled at him: a smile that was only what it needed to be. Not like the natural-borns, who screwed their faces into contortions, whose voices careened from high to low and back again, so that even now he wasn't sure, sometimes, what their words actually meant. McQueen had smiled at him the way he and his batchmates had smiled at each other, and none of the natural-borns had even seen it. He liked that.

Only now Major McQueen wasn't looking at him; he was talking with the humans at his table, the other Angry Angels, like Cooper wasn't even there any more. Cooper wiped his hands roughly on the cloth of his trousers, grimacing. He wanted--he wanted to talk to him. But when he scraped his chair back, standing up, Wang caught at his sleeve.

"I don't think you should do that," he muttered; he looked worried.

Cooper jerked free, away from the natural-born, and took a couple of long steps toward the Angels' table. McQueen looked up again as Cooper closed in, but he wasn't smiling any more; he looked forbidding, almost angry. Cooper nearly flinched, but pressed doggedly forward until he came up short beside Major McQueen's chair. Tension was shivering through his belly and throat, and his arms hung awkwardly at his sides. He didn't know what to say.

One of the other Angels laughed: a sharp snort, not the loud but friendly laugh he'd almost gotten used to from some of the humans in his squad. She leaned forward, both elbows on the table, and curled her lips, smiling widely. "Haven't you got a salute for your betters, maggot?"

She was a captain; he recognized the double bar insignia, and glanced from her to the gold oak leaves on McQueen's shoulders. "Aren't you supposed to salute him?"

Her fists clenched, and she snarled something, but McQueen had stood up abruptly, grabbing his arm and shoulder. "Can it," he snapped, and Cooper wasn't sure if the Major meant him or the woman; but McQueen was shoving him away from the table, toward the door, and Cooper went gladly. He'd rather talk to McQueen without the natural-borns around, anyway. McQueen bundled him outside and across the roadway, down an alley next to a supply building. There was a light over the locked side door, and McQueen dragged them both into the pool of illumination it gave before he let go, and took a step back.

Cooper stood there, catching his breath and frankly staring, while his heart hammered with nervous excitement. McQueen was a couple of inches shorter than him, but although the black flightsuit absorbed the light Cooper could tell that his body was solid with muscle; he was probably stronger than Cooper was. His face was square, with little lines just appearing in the skin around his eyes; the beret had slipped a bit, showing short hair touched with grey. Old. Ten? Twelve? Cooper had no way to guess; he'd never seen an in-vitro more than a year older than himself.

McQueen was watching him, too, hands on hips, and he spoke first. "Cooper Hawkes, right?"

Cooper's face was hot with the throbbing of his pulse, and it was hard to breathe; he tried to clear his throat, and nodded. "What are you?"

"Major Tyrus Cassius McQueen."

Cooper waited, but apparently that was all the identification the other was going to give. "Tyrus?" he repeated, questioningly. He'd never heard a name like it before.

The other shook his head warningly. "You call me Major McQueen. Or sir."

"Oh," Cooper said, and then added quickly, "Yes, sir." He hesitated a moment. "Am I supposed to salute you?"

"Yes." The reproving expression cracked and eased, then, and McQueen smiled again. "But we'll let it go, this time." The tautness in Cooper's chest relaxed; he took a deep breath of the cool night air and smiled back, gladly.

"That was a damned foolish stunt you pulled in there, you know," McQueen went on. "Recruits don't go walking up to full-fledged Marines like they've got a right. You're just asking for trouble." He tilted his head. "Didn't you know you were out of line?"

Cooper shrugged. "Yeah, Wang said."

"And you did it anyway?" McQueen raised an eyebrow.

"I wanted to talk to you. You're the first in-vitro I've seen in--in a long time." Since Ephraim, whitefaced in the darkened bunkroom. And now that he was standing here, with Major McQueen, in the small pool of light surrounded by darkness, he didn't know what to say; only that he didn't want McQueen to leave. He'd been so alone.... "How long have you been in the Marines?"

"Fourteen years."

Fourteen years. He had to be at least sixteen, then, or even older if he hadn't been placed here to begin with. Cooper couldn't imagine being that old. "You like it here? Sir?"

McQueen nodded. "The Marine Corps is the best branch of the service. And the air side's the best part of the Corps; there's nothing like flying."

Cooper had almost forgotten that; they were supposed to be training to be pilots, although all they'd learned so far was basic infantry stuff. Now he stared in wonder at the other in-vitro. He'd flown. In the sky, like a bird; and out into space, too, farther than even the birds could go. "I want to do that," he said forcefully, and McQueen smiled again.

"Well, you picked the right place for it."

"I didn't pick it," Cooper admitted, and McQueen looked at him inquiringly.

"Were you placed here?"

"No, sir." He shook his head. "The judge decided to send me here instead of jail."

"Jail?" McQueen asked sharply. "What happened?"

Cooper shrugged again. "Went after a couple of natural-borns with a crowbar, when they laid into me." He saw McQueen's eyes widen in surprise, but he didn't want to talk about that now. There were more interesting things, things he wanted to know. "You're a major; that's pretty high up, right?"

McQueen blinked. "Not too high. Haven't you learned the rank structure yet?"

Cooper nodded impatiently. "So do they salute you? The natural-borns? Do they do what you tell them?" He wanted to see that. He imagined Major McQueen snapping out commands, like the DIs did, and the woman who had laughed at him jumping to obey, and grinned.

"Hawkes," McQueen said sharply, and Cooper stopped smiling; the Major looked angry again. "We all have our orders. I follow mine, and you follow yours. Being a Marine means discipline, dedication--not some way to score points off natural-borns. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir." He frowned unhappily, and McQueen saw.

"What?"

"You make it sound like the facility. Doing what we're told."

"No," McQueen told him, more quietly. "It's not like that. You have to earn a place here, but when you earn it, no one will take it away. And it's a good place, Hawkes, an important one."

An important place. The monitors had told them that their placements would be important, serving the country that had made them; Cooper was fiercely glad he'd never done whatever job they would have placed him in. But McQueen was an in-vitro, like him, and he was sixteen years old, or more, even. He didn't mean important to the monitors; watching his face, Cooper could tell that it mattered to McQueen himself.

McQueen was an officer. He could give orders to the natural-borns, and they'd obey him. Looking at him, Cooper was sure he didn't need to sleep with a rock clenched in a hidden fist, like Cooper'd done for the first week or so, just in case. He'd been talking with the rest of the Angels, easily and confidently, and Cooper had seen the humans paying close attention to him.

And he was a pilot, too. He flew. "Yes, sir," Cooper said. He wanted to ask what flying was like, away up there in the sky, but McQueen was glancing at his watch.

"You'd better get back to barracks, Hawkes; it's getting close to curfew for you."

"I don't care," he protested. The DIs mostly just gave stupid punishments, anyway: running around the drill field holding his rifle straight up over his head, or KP duty, or something. He'd rather stay and talk. But McQueen shook his head.

"You should care. If you want to be a Marine, you'll have to."

Cooper accepted that, grudgingly. "Can we talk again? Tomorrow?"

"Maybe. But you pull another stupid stunt like you did in there and I'll whip your ass myself, you hear me?" But he was smiling a little as he said it, and Cooper smiled back as he saluted.

"I hear you, sir."

He made it back to barracks with barely enough time to check in and strip before the lights went out, and climbed into his rack by feel. Curling up tightly, he hugged his knees, then reached up to touch the photo of the bird; he was flushed with elation, giddy as though he'd been running hard. He didn't think he'd fall asleep for hours, but he did, and dreamed he was a bird, so high in the sky that the buildings of the facility looked like toys, distant and flimsy.

He looked for Major McQueen all the next day, but when he finally saw him, across the open space in front of the administration building, he was with the rest of his squadron, all the Angels jogging past the straggling line of recruits toward the hangar where their planes were parked. He knew not to interrupt, but he dropped away from his own platoon a little, watching, and McQueen saw him; the Major nodded minutely, and jerked his head for Cooper to get back into line. Cooper obeyed, but he followed the line of black uniforms with his eyes until they rounded the corner and were gone. He'd fallen out of step with the cadence by then, and one of the DIs was yelling at him; he remembered what McQueen had said about discipline, and conscientiously corrected himself. A little while later, he heard the roar of engines, and knew McQueen had taken off, into the sky.

The Angels were gone for days. Cooper kept hoping, but he never saw McQueen, or any of them, and the wing of officers' quarters where the 127th lived was dark every night. He even asked Vansen when they'd be back, but she didn't know, and when he asked Sergeant Bougus all he got was a lecture on minding his own business and fifteen extra laps to run. He did them sullenly, as slowly as he could get away with, and lay in his rack staring at the ceiling that evening, while the others talked in low voices or wrote letters before lights-out.

The next day was Sunday, and the recruits got an hour free to go to church, if they wanted, between breakfast and morning drill. He'd been curious, once, and Pags had invited him along. But the sermon was boring, and when he'd asked Pags about it later God had sounded like some kind of super-powerful monitor: knowing everything, punishing people. He couldn't understand why natural-borns would want to adore him. Do what he said, maybe, if they had to; but Cooper'd never bothered about him before, and he wasn't going to start now. If he hadn't been hit by a flood or something yet, he figured, he wasn't likely to be. Pags had talked about life after death, but Cooper already knew there was nothing after death. Just a blank, where something had been erased. Besides, on his way out afterward, someone from another platoon had shoved against him, and as he caught his footing the other had hissed, "Piss off, nipple-neck. You don't belong here." Cooper had wanted to crush the man's larynx, but he thought he was probably right.

So now on Sundays he spent the time cleaning up his rack and his gear, if they needed it, and if not he would just walk for a while, through the grounds of the base and away from the buildings to the drill field, empty for the hour. The sky seemed bigger here than it ever had in the city, and bluer. In Philadelphia the buildings had split it into strips and wedges; and though the facility's walls had been no more than twelve feet high they had seemed to cut it off somehow, tearing it on the barbed wire at their top, so that the facility's sky was not the sky of the unknown outside. The soundless expanse he had imagined, gazing between the bars of the dormitory window out over the human city, was here. It arched over the base, where nothing rose more than four stories to gouge into it, and the drifting puffs of cloud only marked off how far above them it was.

No one was around. He sat down on the grassy slope at the edge of the field, leaned on his hands and let his head fall back, just looking up, and then closed his eyes to feel the sun's warmth heavy on his skin. Tiny living things scuttled across his fingers. He heard nothing, until a shadow fell across his face and he started, and opened his eyes.

McQueen was standing over him, between him and the sun; the glare from behind his shoulders haloed his face and his black flightsuit, throwing them into shadow, but there was no doubting who it was. Cooper scrambled to his feet in a quivering mixture of relief and excitement, and saluted. "Major McQueen."

McQueen acknowledged the salute, and waved a hand. "At ease, Hawkes. Sit down," he said, and did so himself, patting the ground beside him.

Cooper obeyed, sitting where McQueen had told him but leaning forward as much as he could, elbows on his knees. "I looked for you every day, sir," Cooper told him intensely.

McQueen nodded. In the sunlight Cooper could see that his eyes were blue, like Cooper's own. "Sorry. We got shipped out suddenly; there was a situation developing. I'd've let you know, if there'd been a chance."

He remembered McQueen's eyes meeting his across the yard, the quick nod of acknowledgement even as the Major warned him back into line with the others. "Would you really?" 

"Yes," McQueen said, smiling, and Cooper flushed with pleasure. The Major would have come to find him, come up to him like Cooper'd done in the bar. Like he'd done now.

"Where did you go?" he asked.

"Grozny. Four days on station, peacekeeping."

It didn't mean anything to Cooper. "Did you fly?"

McQueen nodded. "Tactical exercises; just a show of force."

Cooper looked back up at the sky: pale blue near the horizon, deeper and darker in the middle. He wondered how long it took to go completely black, as you went up. "What's it like, sir? Flying?"

McQueen sighed. "Sometimes it's like sitting for hours in a box about four inches larger than you are, trying to wiggle your toes because it's the only way you might be able to keep your legs from seizing up, and praying all the time that some jackass doesn't decide to launch a SAM at you for the glory of the fatherland." He glanced over at Cooper then, and smiled a little, wryly. "But that's not what you want to hear, is it?"

Cooper shook his head, hard, once. "That's not what I mean. What's it _like?_ "

McQueen sat back. He looked away from Cooper, up to the sky, and Cooper watched him, waiting. He could see some of the tension easing in the muscles around McQueen's mouth, the ones that had stayed taut even when he smiled. McQueen took a deep breath, and closed his eyes briefly.

"It's like-- In the atmosphere, low altitude, it's like riding a cannonball. And in space...it's like floating. No matter how fast you're going, or how hard the centripetal force slams your guts into your throat when you spin, it's like...being in the middle of it all. There's nothing like it." He opened his eyes again, meeting Cooper's hungry stare; he looked amused. "You'll get there."

Cooper wanted to be there now, wanted to just fling himself off the grassy slope right up into the sky. He hitched sideways a little, closer to the other.

Then he thought of something. "You said 'praying,' before. Do you do all that--that God stuff, sir?"

McQueen shook his head. "It's a figure of speech."

"Sounds like a lot of crap to me," Cooper said sourly. "Natural-borns got no monitors; what do they want to go looking for one for?"

McQueen studied him, thoughtfully. "You're young to be so bitter, Hawkes. You can't be older than six or seven; where were you placed, that you could get into the kind of trouble that got you here?"

Cooper grimaced. None of the cops had asked how old he was, or slit open his scalp to check his ID plate; they'd just thrown him into a holding cell, and then in front of the judge. But he knew the standard placement was for five years, until the in-vitro was released at age seven, and if they'd found out he wasn't even six yet they'd have wanted to know why he wasn't working wherever the monitors would have sent him. "I--ran away from the facility. Before we were placed."

"You ran away?" Surprised.

"I had to," he said, and his gut cramped with remembered terror. "I killed a monitor."

McQueen jerked. "You did _what?_ "

"He was gonna kill me!"

They stared at each other, motionless, for a long moment. Cooper was trembling--he'd never said it out loud before, not even to himself. He dug his fingers into the warm dirt, and clung to the steady blue support of McQueen's eyes.

"He was going to kill me. They'd already killed Suzanne, and then he called me out to the infirmary.... I saw him behind me, in the reflection, with a knife. A scalpel. And I took it away from him, and I stabbed him, and I ran away--" His throat was tight, and the last word choked him; he squeezed his eyes almost shut, to stop them burning, and McQueen's hand touched his arm, gently. No one had touched him like that since--Ephraim. He opened his eyes, and the hand stroked him once and fell away; but the blue gaze held his.

Without looking aside, McQueen nodded downhill, toward the natural-borns. "They don't know?"

"I guess not. I mean, if they did, they'd have--"

"Executed you. Yes." McQueen did turn away then, crossing his arms on his raised knees and gazing somberly out across the field. In profile, Cooper could just see his navel, and a part of him wanted to reach out and touch it. But McQueen was saying something more.

"Over half of us abort in the tanks, before we're born. Another twelve percent die of crib death in the first week." His voice was strained. "I suspected that they--weeded us out, after that, but I've never heard of anyone--escaping. Like you did."

Cooper thought he might say something more; his throat moved, but he was silent. Cooper waited for a moment, and then exhaled, long and slow. McQueen turned back to him then. His face was pale.

"Sir?" Cooper asked hesitantly. Was the Major angry with him?

McQueen took a slow breath. "It's all right, Hawkes," he said. "I was just--surprised." He shook his head a little, as if to clear it. "Don't worry," he went on. "This isn't a facility; you're safe here."

Cooper nodded. Safe. In a good place, maybe an important one. With enough food, and interesting lessons even if the DIs yelled, and now--maybe not so alone. He remembered McQueen's compact, assured movements as he'd pulled a chair out and sat down among the natural-borns in the bar, talking easily with them, and he wondered if he could learn that. And to fly, like McQueen. 

"Have you been on your own since then?" the Major asked him.

"Four years or so. I got by."

"You can do better than that here."

Cooper nodded again, believing it. "Yes, sir."

Across the field a whistle blew, short and shrill, and McQueen got to his feet. He reached a hand to help Cooper up; his grip was strong and warm, not slipping against the sweat in Cooper's palm. Cooper let himself be pulled up, and he was sorry when the Major let go, but they walked back across the field together, side by side. At its edge McQueen stopped and turned to him. "My squadron's being sent east again; I'll probably be shipping out later today. I don't know when I'll be back, but I'll look you up. Until then, you keep your nose clean, you hear?" Cooper didn't understand the phrase, but he could guess what it meant. He saluted crisply, smiling, and felt a tingling thrill again when McQueen smiled back. Then the Major turned and strode away, toward the hangar and the planes. Cooper watched him go, wishing they could have talked longer. But he had to report for drill, anyway.

And that day was the best he'd ever had. He didn't know what to expect when Sergeant Bougus started shouting instructions, but Pags, beside him, clearly did; he grinned broadly even before the DI was halfway through.

"Today you're going to learn how to fall down. Now I know you can all fall down; I've seen you shitheads falling down all over this base! But before you hit chow tonight I'm gonna throw your worthless asses out of a plane at twelve thousand feet, and if you can't fall right the rest of the squad'll be wiping you up with a sponge! Move out!"

They spent the next couple of hours learning to pack and unpack the complicated mass of ropes and harness and nylon that was a parachute rig. Cooper hadn't known what a parachute was, but when the jump master showed them slides of what the ground would look like from altitude, and began explaining how they would guide themselves down, he caught his breath, hard, in wonder. And after that, as Sergeant Bougus had said, they learned to fall down: feet together, knees bent, taking the impact along the length of one leg and letting it roll them hard over. They did it again and again, and then they marched out to a broad meadow at the far edge of the base and did it some more, this time jumping off a high tower to skid, hanging from a dummy rigging, down a slanting wire; the wire ended ten feet above a sandpit and they slammed ground hard if they got it wrong. Cooper liked it. The fall was exhilarating, and the roll over and up again, trying not to get tangled in the rigging, was supple and satisfying if he managed it right, and a well-deserved jarring blow if he didn't. And from the time he'd understood what they were going to do, his skin had been itching with excitement. He'd never been in an airplane, never been higher than the scaffolding on a Philadelphia construction project. And now he was going to jump into the sky.

He was trembling with anticipation in the plane, and the fifteen minutes it took them to reach altitude seemed much longer. But finally Sergeant Bougus stood up and hauled at the door handle, and the door slid open to a howling roar of wind and endless blue. Leaning over, Cooper could just see the ground, greenish-brown and alien-looking, so far below; but he didn't look at it long. He was more interested in the sky. The wind clawed ice through his jumpsuit, but he scarcely felt it as they lined up and shuffled one by one toward the door. Wang, in front of him, hesitated on the edge, and Cooper ached to just shove him out of the way; but finally Wang fell forward and disappeared, and it was his turn.

Sergeant Bougus tested the radio embedded in the right earpiece of his leather cap, and hitched the straps of his harness a little tighter. "Okay, Hawkes, you check that altimeter every five seconds and at five thousand you pull, got it? And you don't start braking until I say, or they might as well never have uncorked you, 'cause you'll be nothing but a wet spot if you stall out! Ready?"

The deck of the plane was beneath his heels, and the open sky was beneath his toes. He nodded, and let himself lean forward, farther and farther, back arching and his arms wide and the sky took him as he toppled and fell, flying, into it. The wind screamed past him and he screamed back, wildly, into the sky, and it was better than he had ever dreamed it could be. He was lost in it, blind with joy, until finally he heard, faint above the wind, the squawking in his ear. "Hawkes, goddammit, pull your rip! _Now,_ nipple-neck!"

So he did, and the jerk as the canopy exploded above him yanked the scream right out of his lungs and left him gasping for breath. And hanging, in a sudden frozen silence; hanging from nothing but air in the vast silent expanse he had always imagined. Off below his feet was the square bubble of someone else's canopy, shrunk by distance and drifting slowly; he glanced at it, then looked away and out. Slipping his wrists through the toggles, he turned himself a little right, then left, testing; then he let his hands rest loose and just--felt it. Hanging in the sky.

Finally the radio crackled again and somebody--not Sergeant Bougus--started talking him down, directing him in which way to turn and how much to brake. He hadn't even realized how close the ground had gotten, but now it was swelling up fast against him and he had to force himself to hold off, to let it come. Then the radio screamed "Flare!" and he pulled hard with both hands and tried to fall the way he had that morning, but his feet slipped and he was dumped painfully onto his side. The canopy caught air behind him, dragging him along the ground until he could roll over and yank the toggle; then it sagged flat and he was able to get his feet under himself and stagger upright. He was bruised and gasping, and when he pulled off the goggles his face was running with tears and sweat; but it was the best thing he had ever done.

One of the jump masters loped over. "You okay?"

Cooper rounded on him. "I want to do that again." His voice was shaking.

The man squinted at him and laughed. "Yeah, you're okay. Bundle up the rig and get out of the way."

Cooper obeyed, automatically. He could still feel the wind snatching at him, and the stillness after. One by one the rest of the squad landed, and then they repacked their rigs and went up again, and it was even better than before. He couldn't eat much that night, and when he got into bed he looked at the picture of the bird for a moment, and then smiled and closed his eyes. In the dark he saw himself, falling free.

Once they'd learned to jump out of planes, Sergeant Bougus said, they could learn to fly them. Pags had been asking for the chance since the first day, and ever since he'd talked with Major McQueen Cooper had been looking forward to it too. He'd miss the wind and the cold, but in a plane he could fly where he wanted, with the g-force of acceleration, instead of gravity, whipping at him as he strained against it. The control systems were complicated, but he studied them intently and waited with fierce impatience for Sergeant Bougus to pass them for flight training. The sky was wide and blue and cold; but space was deep and black and even emptier. He wanted it, fiercely.

But it was all a cheat. When they had finished the written lessons, memorized the cockpit layouts and all the rules for takeoff and landing procedure, they were led, not to the hangars where the planes waited, where the 127th in their black uniforms had flown in and out, but to an empty, echoing room with a row of dummy cockpits in a semicircle on the floor. Simulators. The air in the pits was stale, and smelled like every recruit who had ever sweated into the plastic seating. When the canopy thudded into place it was pitch-black for a moment, before the VR screen flickered into life; and then the graphics were obviously fake, the colors garish and a thumb-sized blotch permanently dark in one corner. Cooper hated it.

It didn't take long to get the feel of the controls. The unreal plane handled well enough, but the tilting and jerking of the simulator in its cradle weren't anything like what he imagined the g-forces of true flight to be, and he never floated. Bored, he experimented by seeing how long the ship would hold its course if he took his hands off the controls, how far he could drift out of formation before Sergeant Bougus's voice crackled angrily at him over the radio. They took off, and flew around for a while, and then landed again, and they hadn't gone anywhere, just sat in stuffy little boxes in an empty room. He scrubbed himself hard in the shower that night, trying to get the plastic stink off his skin, and watched the bird soaring, motionless, for a long time before he fell asleep.

The flight lessons got a little more interesting over the next few days, as they started on combat tactics. They would fly around practicing maneuvers, and then Sergeant Bougus would announce that an enemy plane was coming in, and they would split up to flank it in any of six or seven ways, and shoot it down. Then it would be two planes, or one hiding in the shadow of the moon, or slingshotting itself around an asteroid to appear with no warning on their six. That one shot Cooper down in its first salvo, and he had to sit in the stale darkness of the cockpit for the rest of the fight, screen blacked, listening to the rest of them gabbling panicked instructions at each other until Vansen finally took it out. After that, he paid more attention. If he had to do this, then even a fake fight with computerized ships was better than sitting in the dark. It got harder, too, as they got better, and sometimes it was fun. But even then it was all crap. Not real, not like what Major McQueen had told him about.

And finally he had had enough. They were taking on a pair of bogies, an exercise they'd done three times already, and the fake enemy ships were as slow as mud anyway. Besides, West had been tapped Red Leader for the drill, and every time he gave Cooper an order Cooper wanted to spit at him. And West knew it, and ground it in.

Fuck it. West was squad leader until the fight was over: until all the fake enemy ships were blasted to fake shards of debris, or until the squad was dead. Or until West was. Cooper grinned to himself in the stuffy cockpit, and when the rest of them juked right, swerving to avoid the attacking bogies, he didn't follow them, breaking formation to swing the other way and meet West head-on as the squad came out of its looping turn. He locked on, and held the course, and almost laughed at West's terrified scream as they collided. As if it were really happening. Then the VR screen flashed its standard destruction image and went black.

Light flared as the canopy was hauled open, and Sergeant Bougus loomed, yelling at him. "You're dead!"

Yeah, sure. Cooper knew what dead was, and he wasn't it. Neither was West, or the others. Just a fake.

"Should have blown your ass away," West muttered. Cooper almost smiled at that, because of course he should have. Would have saved his own virtual ass that way, and left Cooper sitting in a blacked-out pit for the rest of the dogfight. But instead he'd panicked and frozen, and let Cooper ram him.

He almost smiled again when Sergeant Bougus lined them all up and told West to grab his ass, that all their asses depended on each other. West didn't want to touch the tank, that was obvious, and when Vansen got between them he put himself back next to West, not letting him get away. Finally West's hand slapped his buttock hard, and clenched tighter as the sergeant harangued them.

Most of them weren't bad pilots, actually. Even West was all right, as long as nothing spooked him, and Vansen was better than them all. But he was sick of the games. He wanted something real. And he didn't get it, of course; they were all ordered back into the pits to do the whole thing again. Cooper obeyed orders scrupulously, wordlessly, for the rest of the day.

He still landed punishment detail after evening chow, and spent two hours scrubbing steel pots in the kitchens. When they finally let him go, his hands white and puffy from hot water and his ears ringing from the din of the KP staff and the dishwashing machinery, his first impulse was to take a walk, dark as it was, along the edge of the drill field. But another platoon was practicing night maneuvers, and the shouted orders and chanted cadence were oppressive. He would have gone back to barracks then, but he was wound up too tightly; he didn't want to go to sleep, and he didn't want to have to talk to any of the squad, even Wang or Pags.

The bar. He'd go there, a nipple-neck rubbing his presence in their human faces. Yeah.

And, of course, the first people he saw when he came through the doors were Vansen and West, sitting at a table with some of the others, watching the wallscreen TV. They stared coldly at him as he came in, and he glared back, then went up to the bar and bought a beer, ignoring them. The thin, sour taste was just right for the way he was feeling. He turned away to look across the room, and saw Major McQueen come in.

He hadn't even realized the 127th was back again. He'd looked, every chance he got, but he hadn't seen them, and he couldn't hear their planes landing when he was shut up in the simulator all day. He frowned a little, wondering resentfully why McQueen hadn't come to tell him he was back, like he'd promised. But Cooper'd been on punishment duty, KP; maybe McQueen hadn't been able to find him. The Major looked a little tense, and he didn't seem to see Cooper as he slid onto a stool eight feet down the bar and ordered a beer. Maybe the mission he'd been on had been tough. Cooper remembered him talking about surface-to-air missiles, and he knew from the simulators how dangerous those were. He wanted to go up to McQueen, ask him what the mission had been like, how long he'd been back. But looking from McQueen's black squad jacket, with the double-wing insignia of the Angry Angels in silver across the back, down at himself in drab recruit beige, he remembered not to pull any stupid stunts. He didn't want the Major to be angry with him; he could wait until McQueen saw him. He turned a little further around on his stool, hoping to catch his eye.

The bartender handed McQueen a full glass, and wouldn't take his money. "On the house for an Angry Angel." Cooper tilted his head at the words, impressed. McQueen was a major, an Angel; even the natural-borns respected him. Vansen wanted to be in the 127th someday, and Cooper was almost as good a pilot as she was. Maybe he could qualify for them, too. For McQueen's squad.

Then the rest of the 127th came in. Cooper saw some of them nod briefly at McQueen, acknowledging him, but they didn't come over, and he didn't get up to join them. Cooper was glad of that; he didn't want McQueen to get caught up with the humans. The Angels chased a bunch of ground crew away from a table and pulled their chairs together, talking. Cooper looked from them back to McQueen, and saw McQueen watching him.

McQueen's squad was on the other side of the room, and McQueen was over here, watching him. Cooper felt as though he wanted to pull his hair aside and let every natural-born in the room see his navel; he wanted to go over and touch McQueen's arm, the way McQueen had touched him, weeks before. Not with the clawed fingers that West had dug into his ass, but easy, smooth. He couldn't remember anyone else touching him, except under orders or to show him how to do something, since he'd gotten here.

But then there was an angry shout from the 127th's table, and a crash as a chair was kicked over. He looked around, trying to see what had happened; the Angels were piling all over West and Vansen, and then everyone else there from his squad jumped in and the fight exploded. Cooper couldn't tell what had started it. He watched, not moving, and especially not when he saw West double up around a fist in his stomach. He'd felt that more than once; let West learn what a real fight was.

But then one of the Angels slammed the heel of her hand into the base of Pags's skull, sending him reeling; Wang tried to protect him and was grabbed and thrown aside. Cooper tensed on his stool, ready to wade in. Some of his squad were worth fighting for. But behind him he heard McQueen's glass click sharply against the bar, and when he turned he saw McQueen watching him, waiting to see what he was going to do.

Not watching his own squadron. Watching _him._

McQueen met his eyes, and tilted his head slightly toward the melee on the floor. He shook his head, and smiled: the kind of smile, Cooper knew, the natural-borns never saw. A secret tank smile.

If Cooper got into the fight, McQueen would have to as well, and they'd end up fighting each other. And he didn't want to do that. Not for Wang, or Pags, or any of them--and certainly not for that asshole West--was Cooper going to take a swing at Major McQueen. He smiled back, the slightest flick of his mouth, a little contraction in his cheeks, and knew that McQueen knew. And they both settled back onto their stools.

His squad was getting its butt kicked, anyway; none of them were anywhere near as good at unarmed combat as he was, trained since birth. The fight was practically over already when someone's yell cut through the clamor. "Jesus Christ, shut up and turn up the television!"

The brawlers staggered to a halt just as the MPs arrived, but nobody got hauled off. Everyone was frozen, gaping at the screen; one of the Angels still had Wang in a necklock, and he wasn't even trying to get out of it, only standing there, staring, with the woman's arm hooked around his throat. Cooper listened, wondering.

War.

Aliens attacking the colonies on Tellus and Vesta. He knew about Tellus; West had wanted to go, with the woman in his photo locket, only he'd been bumped off the ship to make room for in-vitros. Now the colonists were all dead.

And they were at war.

He looked around, reflexively, to find McQueen already off his stool and heading for the door. The rest of the Angels dropped their opponents and followed him out. None of them looked back.

Cooper turned away from the TV and slumped over his beer.

#   #   #

It was different after that. They got to fly real planes, finally, and drill in space with live weapons against real targets. That was as good as he'd hoped it would be, back before the simulators: as good as Major McQueen had promised. But everything was more rushed now, tenser, and even the DIs began to look afraid.

People were dying. Natural-borns were dying. And they wanted to send Cooper out there to die, too.

He'd been glad the judge had sent him here instead of to jail; the Marines had been the best place he'd lived since Suzanne had been killed and he'd run away. He got clothes, and regular pay, and all he wanted to eat. He'd enjoyed most of the training, liked flying, and lived every day in hopes of another parachute drop. It could have been a good place for him, just as McQueen had said.

But he was not going to die for the natural-borns. Not stabbed in the back with an infirmary scalpel, not strangling at the end of a chain in a Philadelphia warehouse, and not blasted into hard vacuum by aliens fighting a war against humans; he wanted nothing to do with either side. He'd escaped from the facility; he could get out of this place too.

But he couldn't find a chance. They were worked harder now than they had been since the first week, every minute jammed with drill, flight maneuvers, tactical strategy. And there were guards, now, posted everywhere.

He saw Major McQueen once, talking heatedly with a couple of other officers at the entrance to the hangar as Cooper's platoon was marched in for another lunar-orbit drill. He tried to catch McQueen's eye as he went by, but the other in-vitro was intent on what he was saying to the humans and didn't see him. But a few days later the 127th was coming back from a patrol, and he managed to be in the hangar when their planes rolled in. Someone Cooper didn't know, a one-star general, was shouting orders over the engine din, and the Angels were sprinting from their planes toward her and jamming through the doorway that led to the briefing and ready rooms. McQueen vaulted from his cockpit as the canopy was still lifting and swung himself rapidly down the access ladder; he would have been across the tarmac and gone with them, except that Cooper put himself in the way. He didn't care that he wasn't supposed to accost the Major like that. He needed to talk to him.

McQueen stopped short, with a quick glance from Cooper to the general and back. "Hawkes. You managing okay?"

"Yeah--" Cooper began, saw McQueen's expression sharpen and corrected himself hastily. "Yes, sir. But--"

"Good." McQueen looked up at another bellow from the general, lifted an apologetic hand to her and flicked his eyes back to Cooper. "Listen, it's not as bad as the rumors say. We're doing a little pounding of our own. And you can make a place for yourself, in war. I was commissioned in the AI War, from the ranks; and you'll be commissioned when you graduate, second lieutenant. You're a Marine. We take care of our own." He touched Cooper's shoulder briefly and wheeled away, dodging through the milling ground crew to salute the general and follow her inside. Cooper watched him go, with a bitter anger at the back of his throat.

He was an in-vitro. He knew who the Marines took care of. And he didn't understand McQueen at all anymore.

Then they got a new assignment. A training mission on their own, away from the guards and the sergeants; he thought for a moment it might be his chance, until he found out where they were going. He for sure couldn't try to run for it on Mars. He filed aboard the ISSCV with the rest of them, helped unpack and stow the gear, and didn't say anything when the others started talking about the aliens, in the racks the first nightshift in space. Nobody knew how many of them there were, or what they looked like, but there were a lot of rumors going around. Cooper didn't care; it wasn't his fight.

"I remember when I saw my first AI," Wang said. "It looked so human, but something inside me could just tell."

In the edge of his vision he could see Damphousse nod. "I felt that way when I saw my first in-vitro."

He didn't care. He didn't care what she thought of him, or if she'd decided not to be his friend any more, or anything. He could get along just fine on his own, he told himself, trying to squelch the desolate ache in his gut. Even Major McQueen would rather be with the natural-borns than with him. Staring stonily up at the grey steel of the upper bunk, he counted days. Two weeks, no more, on this mission, and then he'd be back on Earth and he could find a way to get out. There had to be one. He wasn't going to stick around and let them kill him now, not when he hadn't before. His open eyes were dry and burning, and he blotted out the sight and sound of the humans, remembering the picture of the bird: alone, in the empty sky.

He dreamed, when he finally fell asleep. All the members of his squad, Damphousse and Pags and Vansen and the others, were clustered around him, glaring harshly at him. And there were more of them than there could possibly have been, more than there were in the whole platoon, because all of their kin were there too. West had his arms around his brothers, one on each side, and Vansen's sisters were with her, too, and her parents. Wang's grandmother was there, looking just as she had in the photo his mother had sent him from her mother's--Wang's grandmother's--eighty-third birthday party. Tiny, wrinkled and white-haired, older than he had ever thought anyone could be, she held Wang's hand in one of hers and poked Cooper, hard, in the gut with the other.

He stumbled back from them all, his arms outflung. There was no one to catch him, no kin; he toppled away into sucking cold blackness and where his parents should have been, his siblings, there was nothing. He flailed, choking, crying for help, and there was no one. Just a genetic code, designed and pieced together by a monitor somewhere, and engraved on the steel chip in his skull above his left ear. It hurt, in the dream, lancing fire through the bone where the needle-thin screws went in; the pain woke him up, and he pressed a shaking hand against the side of his head as if he could still feel the drill. Stupid. They'd put it in when he was born, before he could even talk; he'd seen it done to the younger ones, helped hold them steady. And the scar was barely half an inch long, and it never hurt.

Then he heard Vansen, opposite him, whimpering in her sleep. He turned on his side and watched her, curiously. She sounded a little like he'd felt, before he woke up, and he wondered what natural-borns dreamed about. Not monitors drilling holes in their heads, that was for sure. Pags had told him a dream once, about some woman he'd seen in a movie; it hadn't made much sense, but Pags had enjoyed it. Vansen didn't sound like she was enjoying this one.

He got up and went to crouch next to her rack, thinking. She was curt to him, but she was that way to them all, and she'd never called him names. All the rest of them, except Pags, had said something about tanks, about him, at one time or another. Even Damphousse. And besides, Vansen was the best pilot in the squad. She moaned, then, and he touched her arm, then pulled back as she started awake.

She didn't thank him, just said, shortly, "Sorry I woke you."

"Wasn't asleep."

She nodded, turning on her side and pushing the long hair off her face to look at him. "Don't take this the wrong way," she said, and he tensed a little; but she only went on, questioningly, "I always heard that in-vitros couldn't dream...?"

Huh. He hadn't heard that one before. "I dream," he said. He almost told her, then, what he'd been dreaming, but at the last moment he didn't. Why should he? She'd been in his dream, her and all her kin, and he was alone. So he lied. "When I dream, I see my parents." And she believed him, he realized with surprise, even though that was obviously impossible.

Her parents were dead, she said, killed by the AIs when their home was attacked during the last war, when she was five. He shrugged, not wanting to care, but feeling an aching envy underneath. She'd had parents; she'd lived with them for as long as Cooper's whole life. He'd never had kin, and never would.

And anyway, she had even more. "Your sisters still alive?" he asked gruffly, and she nodded and held her right hand out, showing him her palm.

"That night, during the attack, my sister tried to scream," she told him. "I put my hand over her mouth, and she bit into me...."

He'd seen the scar before, but now he knew what it was. The mark of her kin's teeth, engraved into her flesh. No metal identity plate, not for her. He held her hand between his, fingering the tightness of the scar tissue gently; her palm was firm and warm, and he couldn't remember the last time he had touched someone like that. Just touched them.

Yes, he could. Sitting next to Suzanne in the dormitory bunk. Easing the cramp from her leg, gently rubbing, and then moving up. Other times, after that, and before.

"Did you ever lose anyone close?" Vansen asked him then, and he jerked with memory and anguish and clutched at her; at the last moment he remembered the film and tried to do it like the natural-borns had, pressing his mouth against hers, but he must have done it badly, done it wrong, because she threw him off and hit him, the kin-scarred palm ringing hard against his face. He backed away, shaken.

"What the hell was that?" she demanded, and she was laughing at him, scornfully, the way West did sometimes when Cooper screwed up in the tangle of human rules. He clenched his fists to stop his hands trembling. It took him a moment to find his voice.

"I don't know a lot about loss and nightmares," he said hoarsely, "so don't get them all in an uproar." He didn't know what he'd done wrong, but he didn't care. He was sorry he'd ever woken her up. He should have let her lie there bawling. Recklessly, he added, "I won't be around here much longer, anyway," got back in his rack and turned his back on her. On them all.

He understood better two days later, an hour or so before they were to land on Mars, when he woke up with an erection. That still happened sometimes, though never as often now as it had when he was young. The natural-borns usually pulled on briefs or something, even if they were going straight from the rack to the head. But Wang's three-minute rule didn't seem to matter now as much as it had early on, so Cooper didn't give it any thought, just pushed himself up when the speakers buzzed a tinny reveille and turned toward the head and the chemical wipedown that was all the ISSCV had for a shower.

Vansen's voice, from her rack, was chill with distaste. "Cover it up, Hawkes. Nobody wants to look at it."

He didn't even understand what she meant, for a moment; then he saw where she was looking, and West was glowering hatefully at him too. He hesitated, not sure what to do, and Vansen punched her pillow like she wished it was his balls and turned away. Down the line, Pags was gesturing him toward the head, looking nervous; so he ignored both of them and went for a piss. Pags seemed upset, but nobody said anything.

So now he knew. He'd heard some of them sexing themselves in their racks on base, sometimes, and he'd done it too, although since no one ever seemed to do it except after lights-out he hadn't either, trying not to break any more of the natural-born rules. And he was pretty sure he'd seen Vansen having her breasts rubbed by a recruit in another platoon once, in the late-night shadows between the bar and the barracks; he'd watched for a while, curious, but it was too dark to see much, and when he got closer they saw him and walked away.

So he knew they sexed. But not with him. He remembered now: tanks sexed. Humans made love.

Well, he wouldn't give one of them a chance to hit him again.

They landed on Mars a little past local noon, although it was barely 0800 by the ship's clock, and the hatch doors opened onto blank red sand that bunched into small hillocks and sagged away between them, under the glare of a too-small sun. The natural-borns straggled out into the open, awkward and bulky in their environment suits even in the lighter gravity, and stood there blinking. Cooper hauled up an armload of equipment and stomped out after them.

"What are you," he growled, "looking to buy real estate? Let's go; there's a war on." It was their war, after all.

And of course, the moment he opened his mouth West had to start acting like he was still Red Leader, bossing them around and demanding that they secure their position, like the manual said. Cooper figured that when he rammed West in the simulators that time the natural-born was probably trying to remember if the manual said what to do when the wingman came at him full throttle. He said so, scornfully, and West leaned toward him until their helmets were almost touching.

"You do what you want," he hissed. "I'll be happy to see you take one the minute we're in battle."

Not if Cooper got a shot at him first, he wouldn't. But the rifles they'd brought were still stowed with the rest of the gear. West told the others to follow orders, do what they were told, and Cooper remembered, with a bitter twist in his gut, McQueen saying something like that to him, in the alley outside the bar. McQueen might be sixteen years old, and a major, but he was doing what the natural-borns told him to, fighting their stupid war like it meant something. He shouted at West the way he'd wanted to shout after McQueen in the hangar, furiously resentful, and when the human whirled and rushed him he screamed again with a desperate glee and met the charge head-on.

But even fighting was useless, clumsy wrestling in the thick suits that held them away from each other, while the rest of the squad jabbered on the radio and tried to pull them apart. Finally Cooper got his shoulders free and slammed his helmet hard against West's, the concussion sending both of them reeling. Through the dizziness he could hear Vansen screaming that they were both idiots. But the humans caught West and helped him up, helped him stagger away. Cooper slumped alone on the red sand, gasping stale bottled air, and hating them.

Someone was standing over him again, raising a hand. But they couldn't hurt him, not with an empty hand when he was suited up. He glanced up, and saw Pags.

He let Pags pull him to his feet, the way McQueen had, once, so long ago now. The natural-born wouldn't say anything in front of the others, but when they had all turned away he'd come back. Cooper supposed that that was as much as he could expect.

He kept sullenly silent after that, as they hiked a couple of miles across gritty terrain to the tracking drone they'd been sent to repair. The rifle was temptingly solid in his hands, but although he thought about sighting down it at West's back, it wasn't worth the trouble it would get him into.

The job, when they got to it, was tediously simple: a dozen of them standing around guarding Damphousse against nothing but red sand while she switched out one component of the drone for another. There was a message disk in it, too, put there years ago in case friendly aliens found it; that was a joke, now. But they listened to it for a few minutes when Damphousse was done: human music, for aliens to hear. The first part of it was mincing and delicate, a sound that made Cooper edgy, wanting something to happen. But the last part was something else. It was loud and raw and furious, and it sounded like the knot that had been pulling hot and tight in his chest ever since the war began, since McQueen had turned his back on him in the hangar, since that morning. It made him want to scream along with it: not the way he had screamed joy into the sky or yelled angrily at West, but the sound he had never made, when they told him Suzanne was dead. When a bogey came smoking over their heads, and all the natural-borns ran and stared after the rumble of its impact, he stole the disk.

It took the rest of the Martian day to hike to the crash site, but by a little after sunset they were all staring at the ship, crumpled against the rocky hillside it had plowed into. Not like anything they'd seen before, not even the alien mock-ups they'd been training against in the last few weeks, cobbled together from whatever the Intelligence people could recover. But definitely not human. Cooper ground his teeth. The war had come to him.

Vansen had taken over, after the fight he'd had with West at the landing site. He was still mad at her for the way she'd laughed at him a couple of days before, and glared at him that morning, but he'd rather have her in charge than any of the others. She was steady in a fight, and she'd yelled at West just as much as she had at him when they'd been scuffling. He could take orders from her, if West had to as well. But she took West with her and some of the others, to go up for a closer look, and told him to stay behind.

Well, he was the best marksman in the squad. It made sense to hold him back, where he could give the others the widest cover. Her plan was good. It wasn't her fault, what happened.

The alien was there, a figure like a tall, angular human in a weirdly jointed space suit; it had tumbled down awkwardly in the wreck, so that they all thought it was dead and leaned in to see. Pags was in front. And then there was a ripping burst, and Pags was behind the others, flung on his back in the sand so that the air tanks canted his body awkwardly to the side, and there was a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. Cooper cursed, trying frantically for a shot, but they were all screaming, bolting for cover across his line of sight and firing wildly. Vansen was yelling over the radio, ordering them back into formation and onto the attack, and then the alien's shot hit the fittings of her suit and Cooper could only hear her choking for breath.

He was already running forward when he saw West--West, of all of them, West who panicked and froze in the thick--tackle her into the ground and jerk his own oxyhose loose, wedging it into her helmet's uptake. Cooper got there a second later, skidding to a halt and swerving to cover them against fire from the jumble of rocks and wreckage. The others managed to regroup around them, and someone broke out an emergency kit and patched Vansen's hose, while she and West buddy-breathed on his. It didn't take long. But when she got to her feet again Pags was still sprawled motionless, a few yards away, with blood seeping through cracks in his suit to dry almost instantly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Cooper gripped his rifle tightly, bitter anger swelling in him the whole time they were tracking the alien down and cornering it, marching it back to the ISSCV to try to interrogate it. Pags was dead, for nothing. Cooper was fiercely glad when the alien died too, choking on the water Damphousse gave it as if it were poison, but it didn't change the fact that Pags was dead. Erased. And it could just as easily have been him.

#   #   #

Pags's funeral was strange. They'd almost never worn the dress uniforms before, and the cloth felt stiff and awkward against Cooper's skin. Pags's kin were there, a lot of them, crying. The chaplain was there too, saying more things about God and life after death, and nobody else said anything. What was the point, anyway, when Pags was dead? Cooper remembered Ephraim, breathing out soft and long to him as the monitor led him away. It had been comforting, even terrified as he had been. What good would that have done, if he'd already been dead? What good would a funeral have done Suzanne? He wished Pags wasn't dead, but he didn't see any reason to stand at attention to a corpse.

He headed back toward barracks after the ceremony was over, along with the rest of the recruit platoon. They had half an hour before evening mess call, and he figured he'd change out of the conspicuous dress blues and scout the gate guards. He needed to ditch this place soon, before they sent him out again. But as the platoon rounded the last corner to the barracks he saw Major McQueen leaning against the building's wall, off to the right of the door. The Major straightened when he saw Cooper, and moved forward a little, toward him.

Acid burned in his gut. Now McQueen wanted to talk to him? The other recruits sidled to the left; the ones who were closest saluted quickly as McQueen came up, and then ducked inside. One of them hissed something about nipple-necks as they moved away. 

"Sir," Cooper muttered. He didn't salute, but McQueen only nodded at him.

"Hawkes," he answered. "C'mon," and began walking, back the way the platoon had come.

Cooper hesitated momentarily, then fell in beside him. Despite his angry frustration, part of him was glad McQueen had come to find him, waited here for him. He didn't want to leave without talking to McQueen. He didn't want to leave McQueen at all; he just wasn't going to stay when staying meant getting killed, like Pags had.

"What're you doing here?" he demanded. He couldn't understand why the hell McQueen would fight their war.

But the Major didn't seem to understand the question. "I managed to clear some time. It's the first free hour I've had since this thing started." He did look like he'd been working hard; his flightsuit was creased and smelled of sweat and engine fumes, and his face was lined with fatigue. As they passed the mess hall he turned right, and Cooper realized they were heading away from the buildings and the tense bustle of the base, toward the drill field. McQueen took him a little way out into the open space, and his eyes, when he turned to Cooper, were gentle. "I'm sorry about Pagodin. I know he was a friend of yours."

Cooper scowled. "I don't need natural-born friends." When he left here, he'd probably never see any of them again.

Or McQueen.

"Why are you here?" he burst out. "Why are you fighting their war?"

McQueen's shoulders stiffened a little. "It's our job, Hawkes," he said sharply. "We're Marines."

"I didn't ask to be a Marine! It's not my job!" He was breathing fast, the blood burning in his face, his hands. "What do you want to die for them for?"

"I don't want to die," McQueen retorted angrily. "But I will do what I have to to defend this country, this planet. That's what Pagodin died for. Don't you want to protect the people he loved, the people you saw mourning him today? He was your friend!"

_"Friend?"_ Cooper yelled, his voice cracking. He spun away and took a couple of quick steps, clenching his fists so hard he could feel his knuckles straining at the skin. He didn't want to fight with McQueen. He inhaled sharply between his teeth, warning himself to cool down, and turned around again, glaring.

"I knew this guy, one summer in Philadelphia. I'd gotten a job streetsweeping; ten bucks a day for thirty square blocks, and sometimes one of the pretzel sellers would give me one when I came by. Greg had the next district over. We'd finish up at the same place, and go turn in the brooms together. Once there was a wind, and he saw my neck."

McQueen didn't say anything. Cooper ground his teeth, remembering.

"He acted a little weird, but the next day he said it didn't matter. That he liked me anyway, I was okay. Only he didn't show up the day after that, and after I signed out that night he caught up with me. Him and four of his friends."

They'd been drunk, and that was what had saved him; he hadn't been expecting it, not from Greg. It was Greg who had slashed his arm as he flung it out to block the knife, twisting to kick at the others coming at him from behind. He'd managed to nail one of them hard in the balls, and stabbed another, and all five of them had cut and run, while he fled the other way. He couldn't go back to that job, either, and it had been a good one.

"I'm sick of trying to be friends with natural-borns," Cooper said harshly. "Fuck them."

McQueen's face was white and taut. Curtly, he said, "They're not all like that. And the Marines aren't like that."

"So what?" Cooper shouted, and McQueen's eyes flared; he caught Cooper by the shoulders with both hands and jerked him forward, leaning in to him. 

"How dare you say that?" he demanded. "How dare you dismiss the sacrifice Pagodin made? Do you really think he'd have turned on you like Greg did? Do you think anyone in your platoon would?"

Cooper nearly flinched away from McQueen's anger, but he managed to hold his ground. McQueen's fingers dug into his arms through the stiff jacket, and then he almost staggered as McQueen let him go with a disgusted shove. 

He wanted to say yeah, he did. He didn't trust West, and there was whoever it was who had cursed at them both when McQueen came up to him at the barracks, too.

But even West had never really tried to hurt him. Except that morning on Mars, and Cooper'd known when they were fighting that they couldn't really hurt each other, unarmed in the suits; West must have known it too. He'd had worse hits from Vansen, when they were training in hand-to-hand with the padded pugil sticks, than he'd ever had from West, and Vansen would grin and let him grab her stick to haul himself up again, after she'd caught him on the side of the knee and dumped him over.

And he knew Pags would never have turned on him. Back when they'd just gotten here, Pags had been the first one of them all to talk to him. Pags had explained things to him too sometimes, like Wang did, when he didn't understand. He wondered if Wang would still do that, and then remembered jarringly that it didn't matter. He wasn't going to be here.

He ducked his head away from McQueen's furious glare, staring down at the ground between their feet. "I don't care," he muttered resentfully, and wished he meant it.

"You should," McQueen snapped. "If you don't care about anything except yourself, why should anyone care about you?"

Cooper didn't know what to say to that. McQueen waited a moment, and then took a step back, away from him.

"I've got to go," he said curtly. "I haven't slept in thirty hours, and we're shipping out again at 0800; I don't have time to listen to your crap. I need a shower and some sleep. You think about it, Hawkes." He turned and stalked away.

Cooper watched him go, and when he was out of sight Cooper followed him, slowly, with a dull ache in his chest. He'd meant to scout the fence that night, but he was exhausted, suddenly. He spent the night shaken by dreams he couldn't remember when the reveille trumpet blared, except that McQueen had been in them, fighting someone he couldn't see, and yelling at him.

And the time never seemed right to run for it. Every time he talked to Wang or Damphousse, or any of the others who were most friendly, he remembered again that he'd never see them again, after he left. He never had another chance to talk to McQueen at all; the Major was almost never there, the 127th out on a string of sorties, and Cooper's own platoon was being rushed through the end of training at double-speed. The last few days were a blur of combat drills and jumbled briefings on everything anyone could figure out about how the aliens fought. And then, suddenly, they were graduated and commissioned in another full-dress ceremony. They were lieutenants, now; Cooper was an officer. Like McQueen. The 127th was on the base, talking in hushed voices with each other or overseeing the maintenance of their planes, when Sergeant Bougus called Cooper's squad to order for the last time.

Forty-eight hours' leave. It was a free chance to get out, and Vansen and West were, unbelievably, asking why they weren't being sent straight out to the line, instead of being told to go home and spend time with their families. Cooper didn't have any family, and he didn't have anywhere to go except the hell away from there. But Major McQueen was in the hangar, squatting at the top of an access ladder to work something back and forth in the cockpit of his plane, and Cooper needed to talk to him again. The 127th was going into combat that night, he knew; the aliens--chigs, people were calling them now--had a battalion inside Mars orbit. McQueen would be fighting.

Cooper stood with his hands on his hips and watched, angrily uncomprehending, as McQueen got ready to fight for natural-borns. McQueen knew he was there, Cooper was sure of it, but he hadn't looked up. Cooper looked from him to the plane, surveying it; it was painted with McQueen's wing and squadron numbers, and "Angry Angels" on the side. Like that was his batch, or something. A blast-burn, fresh, marked a near-miss on the tail. Cooper shivered and crossed his arms tightly over his chest, remembering the tech briefings on chig weaponry. If that shot had been a few feet forward and down, it would have blown McQueen's canopy right off, and maybe his head along with it. Cooper didn't want to put his head in the way of a shot like that. Why did McQueen?

"I'll never get in one of those."

McQueen still didn't look at him, concentrating on whatever he was doing in his pit. "Ten of us tanks were with the Tellus colony." He sounded angry, and tired as well. Did he think that Cooper would care about other in-vitros, if he didn't care about the natural-borns?

But he did care about the natural-borns, some of them. He just didn't want to get killed. And there were natural-borns who'd kill him faster than the chigs would; he'd met some of them, starting with the monitor. "Only makes the aliens just as bad!" he insisted.

But he'd killed a natural-born once. Maybe two, although he didn't think he'd hurt Greg's friend that much. And he probably would have killed all three of the ones who'd tried to hang him, if he could have done it before the police showed up and arrested him. He'd been really mad.

The chig had killed Pags. He was pretty sure Pags had been his friend; he'd thought about it, like McQueen had told him to, and he knew Pags wouldn't ever have tried to hurt him. Pags was dead, and so was the chig that had killed him. But there was Wang, still, and Vansen and Damphousse.

McQueen hadn't answered. Like if Cooper didn't get whatever he was saying by now, he didn't even want to talk to him any more.

Cooper knew he could kill chigs, gladly, for what they'd done to Pags. And maybe some humans, too. But that wasn't the point. Couldn't McQueen see that that wasn't the point?

"I'm not gonna die for them!"

And McQueen turned around then, finally, stopped what he was doing and turned to look at him full on. Blue eyes hard and penetrating, McQueen asked him, flatly, "What would you die for?"

Cooper gaped. He'd never thought about it that way. There was plenty he wasn't willing to die for, but he didn't know if there was anything he was. He stared back at McQueen, speechless with surprise. McQueen waited, but when Cooper stayed mute he broke their gaze and turned back to his cockpit.

McQueen had wanted to know what he cared about besides himself. Was that what he meant?

Only McQueen was ignoring him again. If Cooper didn't care about anything else, maybe the Major wouldn't care about him.

Cooper did care. He liked McQueen; he'd been impressed by him the very first time they'd talked, outside the bar, and he'd hated having McQueen angry at him. He hated having McQueen ignore him now. But the Major had asked him a question, and Cooper didn't have an answer. He threw a last disconsolate look at McQueen's back, all he could see of the other, and turned away.

The barracks were empty, with everyone else on home leave. He sat on his rack and tried to think.

Would he have died for Pags? He wasn't sure. He didn't think so, though.

The rest of the squad? He wouldn't piss on West if he were on fire. But--he would have fought for the others, that time in the bar, if McQueen hadn't been there. And any time you were in a fight, you could get hurt. Probably not killed, though, in a bar brawl.

And if his squad hadn't been there, and McQueen had, he'd have fought for McQueen. He knew that.

Suzanne. He would have died for Suzanne.

And he would have, too, he knew, imagining himself grabbing her, not letting the monitor take her out of the dining hall. Because the monitor would have--done something. Shot them? He'd never seen the monitors carrying weapons; they'd probably believed they didn't need them, and except for that once, in the infirmary, they'd been right. And the knife hadn't helped that one; Cooper had killed him with it.

Would he have died for Ephraim?

Ephraim had almost certainly died for him. Had left him a note, because they knew the monitors could hear what they said in the dormitory; but the batch had believed, with good reason, that they could see as well. In-vitros were monitored, always.

He wasn't, not any more. He was free, because Ephraim had been willing to die for him.

Sergeant Bougus had told them, that time when he'd rammed West in the simulators, that their asses depended on each other. That if they didn't back each other up, they'd all be dead. And he knew that that was true, in combat. If he left, pretended to take leave or just jumped the fence that night and ran for it, there'd be one less Hammerhead plane flying when the brand-new 58th Squadron went into combat in three days. And maybe some of them would get killed, because of it. Wang and Pags had been friendly, had explained things to him; and Wang might get killed like Pags had, if Cooper wasn't there three days from now.

McQueen was going up tonight, and every chig he killed was one that wouldn't be shooting at Cooper then. And at the rest of the 58th. McQueen was willing to risk dying, for that.

Okay. He wasn't willing to die, not if it was a sure thing, not for the natural-borns. But for Wang, and Vansen, and because Pags had never once called him a name--and most of all for McQueen--he was willing to fight.

He wished he could find the Major and tell him so. So McQueen would know that Cooper cared about him, would know that every chig Cooper killed three days from now was one that wouldn't be shooting at him later. But he couldn't. The 127th had taken off while he'd sat there, and McQueen was gone.

He did jump the fence that night, but not the one on the base's perimeter, not to get away. He jumped the one that separated the regular grounds from the cemetery, and went to look at Pags's grave.

He'd never wondered, in the facility, what they did with an in-vitro's corpse. When the neonates died, the monitors just took them away somewhere. But humans--Marines, at least--got buried in the ground, apparently, if there was something left to bury. If he was killed in space, though, there probably wouldn't be. He didn't mind that; he kind of liked the idea of his body--whatever was left of it--drifting through the vast black void. Never landing, floating forever, and it wouldn't even need a parachute.

He knew there was nothing after death. He hadn't ever seen Suzanne's body, but he'd seen the neonates who'd died in the cribs, and he'd seen Pags. Just a blank, where the life had been erased; just a piece of meat. But Pags had believed that there was another life after death, something besides the corpse that would go on forever. Cooper didn't think he was right, but he might be. And if so, maybe he was around somewhere; Pags hadn't been very clear about that part. So.

He breathed out, slowly, then felt stupid. Pags wouldn't even notice, unless natural-borns got a hell of a lot more observant after they died. And if life after death was as good as he'd insisted it was, what did he need Cooper's exhalation for, anyway? So Cooper tried talking out loud, and that felt stupid, too. Pags was _dead._ Cooper was talking to himself.

He wouldn't have died for Pags. He wouldn't now, if Pags were alive. But he would have fought for him. If Vansen had taken him up to the chig ship with the others, he would have fought, and maybe Pags wouldn't have died. He didn't think there was any way for him to tell Pags that now, but maybe there was. If Pags had been right about that stuff. Cooper didn't think he had been, but if it was possible, he wanted Pags to know. The way the rest of the 58th would know it, when Cooper was still there when they came back from leave. And McQueen would know, too.

Then something caught his eye, and he looked up. Among the stars, in the void of the night sky, flashes of light. The battle.

Every chig McQueen killed, every chig any of the Angry Angels killed, was one that wouldn't be shooting at the 58th in three days.

And every Angel the chigs killed would never shoot again. Cooper stood under the silent bursts, surrounded by dead Marines, and watched. Long after it ended, when the sky was dark and numb, he was still watching. How many bodies, now, were hanging in the sky?

Leave was cancelled, and the 58th came scrambling back all through the next morning. A little after ten, Vansen found him by his plane to say that their orders were in; they were to report for briefing. Then she went off to get West, and Cooper headed out of the hangar toward the briefing room. The sirens stopped him, and he turned around.

Ambulances: eight, ten of them screaming up to the hospital, and medical staff scrambling around them, unloading stretcher after stretcher. Other trucks, off to the side, and the people unloading the bodybags weren't working as fast as the others. Corpses thudded heavily into a pile, black plastic rucking and crackling around them. Not floating at all.

He edged closer, trying to stay out of the way, trying to see; afraid that he would see, that he wouldn't. If McQueen was in an ambulance, then he was alive, he told himself; and right then he heard a nurse yelling angrily, "No, no, this one's dead, leave him alone," throwing a limp form back on a stretcher and shoving it away to reach for another. Cooper leaned forward, aching, afraid.

Red hair. It wasn't McQueen. He looked closer, and realized it was the Angel who'd hit West in the stomach, in the fight the day the war began. He'd been good. Now he was dead.

And McQueen was there. Dead? No--they were slapping an IV bottle onto the stretcher and rushing him toward the door, past where Cooper was standing. McQueen's head was bandaged roughly, the whole left side drenched in blood, and blood soaked the bandage on his left hand. His right eye was uncovered, but it was closed; he was unconscious. He didn't see Cooper as they pushed him by, and then the doors swung shut and he was gone.

Cooper couldn't do anything. He would have fought the chigs for McQueen, would have fought the monitors for him if they'd tried to take him away. McQueen might still die; then the chigs would have erased him just as completely as the monitors had erased Suzanne. And he would never know that Cooper had come back. That Cooper would fight for him. Maybe die.

Cooper clenched both fists and pressed them hard against his thighs. He was shaking.

Then someone touched his arm. He looked over, and it was Vansen, with West next to her. And neither of them looked anything but solemn, even West.

"Come on," she said quietly. "Mission brief in five mikes."

He went with them. Behind him, the ambulances kept wailing, and the other trucks didn't.

The mission they were given was a bad joke. They'd found that chig ship on Mars weeks ago, and there was no way the chigs would still be planning to attack the naval base at Groombridge 34, not once they knew the plans had been captured. Unless the plans had been bogus to begin with, deliberately planted, and that would be even worse. But there wasn't anything he could do about it, except stick with his squad, and help watch each other's asses. They'd been stationed as rear support, just inside Jupiter orbit, and they saw a chig scout on their flight out there to rendezvous with the carrier _Saratoga_ the next day. Just one, which made no sense unless there were more around, somewhere. Hiding.

And he'd barely climbed out of his cockpit onto the _Saratoga_ 's flight deck before they were ordered to another briefing. Because of course the chigs were there, massing just outside the solar system, with practically everything Earth could field--except the new recruit squadrons--decoyed way the hell out to Groombridge. The commanders had risked the war on plans as fake as the simulators had ever been. Cooper slumped with the others in numb silence, waiting; but everybody snapped to attention when the general finally walked in, and behind him the briefing officer.

It was McQueen. Alive.

Desperate relief flooded Cooper's lungs, and for a moment he couldn't breathe, not even to exhale to himself. A day and a half before, bloody and unconscious...and alive. McQueen paused just inside the doorway and looked at him. Right at him, meeting his eyes, and although McQueen didn't smile something loosened in his face. And with it the knot in Cooper's chest throbbed, hard, and relaxed a little. McQueen knew he was there.

"Sit down," McQueen said, and they all sat down. Cooper kept watching him.

The left side of his face was patchy-white with skin grafts and burn gel. He was walking stiffly, and he wasn't using his left arm. But both his eyes were undamaged, chill blue gaze on them all as he heaved the table aside--some of the squad jerked, nervously, at that--and lowered himself into the chair. "I want to be able to look into your eyes," he said.

Cooper couldn't look away from his.

"Courage," McQueen said. "Honor. Dedication. Sacrifice." His voice was different, deeper than before. Maybe it was his wounds; or maybe it was just the way he was leaning forward, watching them all so intently. "These are just the words they used to get you here."

Huh. Cooper knew why he was there, and it didn't have anything to do with fancy natural-born words. Then he heard McQueen say "Life," and he nodded. His own. His--buddies', like McQueen said. The 58th Squadron's.

How many chigs had McQueen killed, that wouldn't be shooting at them today?

This one was a good plan. Stage an ambush from the asteroid belt, and fight a delaying action until the Groombridge forces could get back. If they could hold the chigs here, just long enough, they'd be okay. And if not--well. Payback, anyway.

West called to him as they were getting back into their cockpits. Just his name, and when Cooper glanced over, he didn't say anything else, only looked at him. But it was a different kind of look; not hateful. Not hostile. Just watchful. He remembered the feel of West's fingers clamping into his ass, and he met the look, giving West nothing, and then turned away, climbing into his cockpit and waiting for it to drop and engage with the body of his plane, on the hangar deck below. He was here, wasn't he? That would have to be enough.

But it wouldn't be enough for anything, if the chigs didn't come into the ambush. Cooper could see them on his screen, just on the edge of LIDAR range and far from any place the attack wing could hope to damage them. McQueen ordered them to hold position and wait, but if they waited too long, they'd miss their chance. How would McQueen know that he was willing to fight, if he never did?

He'd found a player for the music disk he'd stolen, and when no one was looking he'd snuck it into the cockpit of his plane. Such a little silver disk, with such a big scream inside it. Not the scream he'd yelled into the wind, and not the one still trapped in his chest since Suzanne. Not this time. Just: Let's go. Time to go.

He was surprised when West wanted to follow him out, and glad when Vansen wouldn't let him. This was his. He gunned his jets and rode their howl toward the cloud of chigs--dozens, hundreds of them, not even the worst drills had been like this, and he fired at anything he could get a lock on, wildly, dodging and juking between the bolts of chig fire and leading them, invisibly, where he wanted them. Where the 58th waited for them. "Stand by," he warned the others, almost there--and then something scorched so close it blacked out his screens momentarily, and when he tried to dodge before the next one locked in the controls wouldn't move; he yanked desperately at the throttle and it wouldn't move. "My controls froze!" he shouted, but they were all too far away, his ass was about to be blown apart--

\--and McQueen was there, on the radio, yelling "Cut your right thruster, you stupid tank!" and he obeyed blindly and the plane lurched aside and down, so that he was flung against the wall of his cockpit when the stabilizers couldn't compensate. He fought the g, struggling to stay oriented, and the chigs poured harmlessly past him, straight into the oncoming attack wing.

His screen flickered to life then, the system coming back on line, and he had some control again; he held course a moment, panting. His left shoulder felt numb and hollow where he'd hit it. But two of the chigs had swerved back, were corkscrewing down on him. He accelerated hard, trying to dodge the Hammerhead out of their lock-on, but the throttle was still sluggish and he couldn't shake them, and this time it was West yelling at him. "Hit the deck, Hawkes, I'm coming in head-on!" and Cooper remembered the time he'd rammed him and managed to veer just enough; he and West sideslipped past each other and the chigs that were chasing each of them couldn't dodge in time and exploded against the asteroid he'd started from, not five minutes before.

He never remembered much of the battle, after that. Just a confusion of noise and careening ships and firing, ducking away, and voices screaming on the radio in agony or triumph. And finally it was over; the Groombridge forces swept through and the chig fleet broke and ran for the nearest wormhole, and Cooper and the others turned back to the _Saratoga._

He climbed painfully out of the cockpit onto the flight deck, and looked around. Wang, and Vansen, and Phousse--but some people weren't there. He'd seen the planes taking hits, exploding. And a couple had wiped themselves out against the asteroids before the fight had even started. But all the others, everyone who was still alive, were jumping out of their cockpits almost before they'd risen level with the flight deck again, yelling and slapping each other on the back. The ground crew was scrambling between them, trying to get at the cockpits, but they were grinning too.

Some of the squad were coming up to him, now, surrounding him, and Damphousse put one arm around him and hugged him, briefly and hard. It took him by surprise, but when Wang did it too he squeezed back. West was there, too, but West didn't hug him. He raised a fist, but slowly; it wasn't an attack, so Cooper let it come, and West hit him, not hard, on the shoulder. It hurt; it was the shoulder Cooper had slammed against when the stabilizers had gone out. But he didn't think West had meant it to.

"Hawkes," West said. "Nice flying."

Cooper nodded. He might have said something, but Vansen hissed "tench-hut!" at them, and he turned around with the others. McQueen was coming down from the observation deck, picking his way toward them through the confusion of cables and ground crew. They all pulled themselves raggedly to attention, and McQueen paused, and looked at them.

McQueen had called him a stupid tank, in the thick. But that had been because he'd panicked when his controls had jammed. Panicked and frozen, just like West had done that time in the simulators, and if McQueen hadn't shocked him out of it he'd be dead now. Really dead. And so would Damphousse, because he was pretty sure he remembered taking out a chig that had locked in on her six, after that.

Vansen drew herself straighter, pulling a deep breath in, and somehow it meant the same thing it would have meant if Cooper had exhaled. "Fifty-eighth squadron, sir," she said. "Reporting in."

And McQueen saluted them. And held the salute, strong and firm, until every one of them had returned it, Cooper most of all.


	4. interlude: dream

He was asleep, in a bunk; he knew it, and he knew too that he wasn't in his rack in camp. There was a droning hum through his skull, and he lifted his head, trying to see, trying to figure out what it was....

It was the morning bell. The dormitory was warm, parallel stripes of light on the floor where the barred windows threw the sun, and the morning bell was ringing. Cooper sat up, confused, and in the bunks up and down the room he saw his batchmates, waking, smiling at him. For a moment he was frightened--the monitors, where were they?--but the door was open, the corridor empty, and his batchmates were there with him, warm and familiar. Cooper didn't understand, but somehow it was all right. Everything was all right.

Better than all right, because Suzanne, Suzanne was there, firm and brown and alive and he grabbed for her, clutching her tight and feeling the press of her skin against his, her arms around his back. And Ephraim was there too, stroking a hand down his face, his side, his batchmates' hands touching him comfortingly, he had missed them so much....

They urged him back onto the bed, and he lay down, smiling at them, and rolled over to press his face into the thin familiar pillow, and their hands settled on his skin and began massaging. Suzanne's strong fingers dug into his neck, squeezing out tension, and Ephraim was easing the soreness in his shoulder, the sharp ache smoothing under his careful kneading. Cooper groaned and relaxed, boneless with relief and pleasure.

The hands paused, and now there were only two of them, not four. Suzanne had moved away somewhere, but it was all right. She wasn't dead, wasn't erased. And Ephraim was above him, settling gently down now against Cooper's back, his stomach, hands, penis, legs, all his body coming to rest against his batchmate's. His foot rubbed along Cooper's ankle, and his weight rode the rise and fall of his chest. Cooper breathed deeply, welcoming the pressure on his lungs. Then he twisted, wanting to hold him, wanting to see him again, Ephraim who hadn't died for him.

Only when he rolled over, the body above him wasn't Ephraim's. McQueen was there, looking down at him, his eyes calm and full of reassurance. His weight pressed against Cooper's body, heavy and warm all along their lengths, skin to skin. Cooper could feel his batchmates around them, watching them, and he closed his eyes. Above him, McQueen breathed out, soft and long.

He wasn't sure when he realized that he was awake. Only that the welcome heaviness on his chest was dissolving, lightening, until he was only covered by the cotton sheet, no other's skin stroking his. That the burr of the _Saratoga_ 's engines was vibrating, faintly, in the bulkhead by his pillow. The rest of the 58th slept, snoring a little in their racks, and none of them were his batchmates, none of them touched him. And Suzanne was dead, and Ephraim, although he could still see their faces, so welcoming.

And McQueen's.


	5. US Naval Carrier Saratoga, Fornax Sector

He hadn't brought much to the _Saratoga_ from his locker in the camp barracks: just some civilian clothes he'd bought, and the music disk and its player. And the medal he'd been given, like the rest of the 58th, after the battle in the Belt. They'd all been promoted to first lieutenants then, too, and McQueen to lieutenant colonel. He didn't care much about the medal, but he was glad to see the new oak leaves, silver ones, on McQueen's shoulders at the ceremony the day before they left Earth. At the reception afterward, when McQueen told them he'd been assigned as their squadron commander, Cooper had flushed warm with elation, the sparkling in his belly better than the champagne Vansen had given him.

He didn't bring the photograph of the bird to the _Saratoga._ He would be flying every day, now, and he didn't need it. He took it down from the wall in the barracks and peeled the tape off, carefully; even so, it tore a little at one corner. Then he put a match to it and let it burn. It didn't seem right to just stuff it into the garbage.

The 58th's wardroom on the carrier was small, with their racks fitted into every spare corner and the lockers packed together against the longest wall; but there was enough space for a table and a couple of chairs in the middle, and the showers and head weren't too cramped. And there was a viewport; he had wondered if there would be, if they'd even get an exterior berth aboard a spaceship this big. It wasn't large, no bigger than the windows of the dormitory had been, and of course it was always night outside. But he could look out, when he wanted to, and see the stars.

And there was the rec room when they wanted more space, and a gym with a track and weights, a library that had music as well as books, a couple of bars and a bowling alley. He'd never bowled; it looked interesting. He and some of the squad explored as much of the ship as they could their second day on board, from the flight deck down to the bilge, and then ended up back in their wardroom, talking. Cooper was sitting on his rack: a bottom one, this time, not the upper one he'd had in training, but it was a while since he had felt the need for escape room in case the natural-borns tried to jump him in the night.

"I can get used to this place," Wang announced, lying back and grinning, hands stuffing his pillow behind his head. "Did you see they carry _three_ sports channels? I never got that at home."

"It's so big," Damphousse said thoughtfully, her chin propped on her hands at the little table; Vansen had the other chair. "Flying in, I kept thinking I must be about to ram right into the hull, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger...."

"Four thousand crew," West told her. His rack was on the upper level, across from Cooper's, and his feet dangled above Wang's head. "Did you see the assembly deck's painted for use as a football field?"

" _I_ saw it," Wang said smugly.

"It's strange, though." Damphousse looked around. "It's so big, but--we're always inside. I wonder if we'll get claustrophobic."

Cooper shook his head. "We'll be flying. How much space do you want?" He liked thinking of the ship, huge as it was, floating in the void. He liked even more the thought of flying every day.

"Yeah," said Vansen. "I'm sure the chigs'll give us plenty of chances to get aloft. That's what we're here for." She paused a moment, thinking. "I'll tell you what feels strange to me--just knowing how far away we are. I mean, on Earth you can't be more than twelve thousand miles from anywhere. Even when we were training in lunar orbit, you could always just look up and see it there, you know? Home. But we're already lightyears out. It just--feels different."

Damphousse nodded. "I was thinking about my father. He used to take me out, at night, and show me all the constellations. And when we were in the rec room earlier, I was looking out the viewport and thinking, I wish Pa were here, to tell me what these stars are. But he'll never see them. Even the stars are different here."

"Kylen and I were going with the Tellus colony," West said. He was looking at his photo locket, holding it cradled in his palm. "My Dad couldn't understand why I'd want to go so far from home, raise a family so far away. He grew up in the house we live in now." He shook his head. "I mean, that he and Mom and my brothers live in. I guess I don't live there any more."

Vansen grimaced. "My sisters couldn't understand why I wanted to join up. Anne's married and all she wants is kids, and Megan--well, never mind Megan." She smiled, a little. "But it's all I ever wanted to be. When I was little, I'd look at my parents in their uniforms, and I'd think, someday I'm gonna wear that too." She glanced down at herself. "I wish they could have seen me."

Damphousse touched her hand. "They would have been proud of you. And your sisters must be, too. Even if they don't say it. They're your family." Vansen shrugged, but her hand closed around Phousse's and squeezed, briefly.

Family. They didn't even seem to realize how lucky they were. All of them had people who shared their genetic codes, people so close that they were almost part of each other. So close that Vansen's sisters could be proud of what she did. Nothing of Cooper extended further than his skin; there was no one who shared that essential core with him. He sat apart from the humans, feeling his skin like a wall cutting him off from anyone else.

"I miss my boyfriend," Damphousse was saying. "He promised to write, but I don't know how often we'll be able to get mail, this far out."

Wang nodded, pensively. "I miss my grandmother. She's getting so old...."

They were all silent for a moment. Then Damphousse turned to Cooper. "What about you, Coop? Do you have--" she caught herself, broke off and tried to cover it-- "anyone? Anyone you left behind, on Earth?"

Cooper stared at her, resentfully. All of them, all their kin. "Nah," he said shortly. "In-vitros don't have families."

"What about friends?" asked Vansen. She had turned around in her chair too, and they were all watching him now, eyes crawling on his skin like they were gawking at his isolation. He hitched angrily forward to the edge of the mattress.

"Friends? I was livin' on the streets. In a shelter, sometimes, when it was too cold and people were freezing to death outside. They'd let me in--and then they'd probably throw me out again, if they saw my neck. My _nipple._ " He jerked his head. "Last job I managed to get, three of them tried to hang me by a chain when they realized I wasn't human. I got no friends."

Wang sat up and leaned forward. "You have friends now, Hawkes."

"And you _are_ human." That was Damphousse, forcefully. Cooper scowled at her.

"Tell it to West," he snapped. West twitched and started to say something, but Cooper didn't want to hear it. He swung out of his rack and slammed the hatch against their prying eyes.

He had nowhere to go, but restless frustration drove him quickstep through the metal corridors. He avoided the surprised glances of the humans he brushed past, barely noticing where he was going; he only wanted to keep moving, away from them.

Eventually he ended up on the flight deck, deserted now, all the cockpits charged and ready with their canopies open. Squatting beside his, he ran his fingers along the edge, where his name and rank were painted in square black letters. _Lt. Cooper Hawkes._ The rest of it--fifth air wing, fifty-eighth squadron, USMC--was on the plane itself, on the hangar deck below. Like McQueen's plane: saying that he'd decided to fight for them. And he had, he would; but the jealous anger still burned in his gut.

All of them, so secure in their families, among their kin. Upset to be so far away from them. It didn't matter where in the galaxy Cooper went; he could never be closer to or farther from kin he didn't have. Sometimes, bitterly, he wished Suzanne had never started the list around; then he would never have known for sure. He could have hoped.

Then sudden realization jolted him; he swayed as if the gravity had failed, and clutched the canopy for balance.

None of his batchmates were kin. But they had never thought to wonder about the other batches. Two-nine-one-seven, mindless and drooling in the cribs, had frightened his batch away from ever really thinking about them; and the older ones had avoided them for what must have been the same reason. And Cooper's batch had wanted it that way, hadn't wanted to be reminded of what they must have been like in the first week out of the tanks, incapable and incoherent.

But there had been eighty-five other in-vitros in the facility, at one time or another, just while Cooper was there. Almost twice as many as there were in his batch. And they had never wondered, would never have tried to find out--but some of them might have been kin. Even if they were from different gene pools, Cooper was pretty sure that it was possible. They could have checked.

But they never could have brought themselves to. Cooper remembered the neonates and shuddered, imagining being kin to--that.

But he had been a neonate once, too, even if he didn't remember it, didn't like to think about it. Someone in three-two-seven-four must have held his head still while the medic attached the identity plate to his skull, must have taped the small cut closed afterward, just as he had done for his share of the younger ones. He could have been kin to one of them--and he would never know now. All those chances, lost forever.

And then he stopped, abruptly, realizing again. There was another in-vitro, here, on the ship.

He might be kin to Colonel McQueen.

And he could find out.

Cooper held himself very still, one hand pressed flat against his cockpit. Remembering McQueen talking to the humans at the hangar door, gesturing forcefully, while they listened with respect. The bleak despair he'd felt when McQueen had been so angry with him, and his effervescent happiness when the Colonel had been assigned to his squad. His pulse throbbed hard against the cool steel. He could be kin to McQueen.

He crouched there, surrounded by the silent possibility, until the boatswain's whistle shrilled the start of the next watch. Mess call, and although he wasn't really hungry, if he didn't eat now he wasn't sure if there would be another chance until morning. He pushed himself up painfully, trying to shake the stiffness out of his legs and his shoulder, which still ached a little where he had hit it in the battle. He rolled the joint, trying to rub it with his right hand, but he had never really been able to massage himself. Suzanne had done it best.

He sat at the smallest table he could find in the mess, not wanting the natural-borns crowding him, trying to talk to him. But he needn't have bothered; although some of the squad saw him when they came in, they sat down across the room and didn't come over. His table was mostly filled by a group of Navy ensigns, who spent the meal talking among themselves about bacteriological sampling and, except for a brief acknowledgement when they arrived, ignored him. Past their backs he could see West and Vansen arguing about something, with brief glances thrown his way.

McQueen didn't eat in their mess, but Cooper knew where his stateroom was. And halfway through the evening watch he was standing in the passageway in front of it, with the meal congealing into a lump in his stomach as he raised a hand to slap his palm against the hatch. The impact rang, thickly, and almost immediately the hatch swung open and McQueen was there.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

Cooper swallowed awkwardly, trying to ease the knot in his gut. McQueen still wore the black flightsuit with the Angels' insignia on it, but it had the 58th's now, too: the Wild Cards. The silver at his shoulders caught sparks from the light behind him as he stood in the doorway, regarding Cooper with a look of neutral inquiry. "I wanted to ask you something, sir," Cooper managed.

"Is there a problem?" McQueen raised an eyebrow.

"No, sir. Just-- " He broke off, in trepidation.

McQueen looked at him more closely, and nodded. "Come in," he said.

The hatch clicked shut behind them, and Cooper found himself in the middle of the room. McQueen had a viewport too, with a desk under it, and a bookshelf against the wall opposite the bed. He had pictures on the walls, too, the way the 58th did.

"Now. What is it, Hawkes?" McQueen asked.

Cooper met his eyes. He wanted to know. "Sir," he said, and it was easier now, in the privacy of the Colonel's stateroom, "what's your genetic code?"

McQueen went very still. "You're wondering if we're related. Family."

"Do you know?" Maybe McQueen had checked already; he could have seen Cooper's records somehow. Maybe he knew...but if he hadn't said anything, then that must mean--but he was shaking his head.

"No," he said quietly. "I don't know."

"Don't you want to?" And a twist of fear; what if McQueen didn't want to? What if McQueen thought of him the way the older batch had, as a neonate?

But neonates grew up. He remembered the way McQueen smiled at him sometimes, how he talked to Cooper like it mattered to him what Cooper thought, and he knew that McQueen didn't think of him like that.

McQueen didn't answer. He pulled the chair out from his desk and sat down, waving Cooper to take a seat on the bed. "A lot of in-vitros look for kin," he said. "Some of us spend our whole lives looking."

"Yeah, but do we ever find any?"

McQueen took a breath, let it out slowly. His gaze slipped past Cooper, to the wall. Cooper glanced around to see what he was looking at, but there wasn't anything there, and when he turned back he saw that the Colonel's eyes were focussed on something much farther away.

"There were thirty-four of us in my batch," McQueen told him. His voice was rough. "They placed us all together, in the uranium mines on Omicron Draconis. One night, early on, a few of us--wanted to know. They started comparing genetic codes." His uninjured hand tightened on his knee.

Cooper leaned forward. "What happened?"

"Two of them were cousins."

A flare of brilliance soared through Cooper's chest. It was possible. In-vitros could have kin! He started to grin, to give a great puff of glad air; but he saw McQueen's fingers pull tight, a fist against his leg.

What could be so wrong, if they were cousins? "Did they--not like each other?" he asked, hesitantly. He remembered wondering what would happen if he and Baxter turned out to be kin.

McQueen looked up at that, sharply. "They were _family._ " He opened his hand and pressed it flat. Cooper was silent, not understanding.

"The mine...was very dangerous," McQueen said slowly. "The human supervisors ignored safety procedures, refused to repair faulty equipment. We were there for five years. Twenty-eight of us died there."

Cooper's gut churned. But McQueen wasn't finished.

"One day...I don't know when it was. All the days blurred together. There were only eighteen of us left, by then, and Joanna and Marius were working the slag trail, keeping the cut clear of the rubble the burrowers threw out, as they tunneled. The scree was hot--radioactive--and the burrowers sprayed it out like shrapnel. The safety hood was long gone.

"One of the shards hit Marius, tore his suit open. In those tunnels you took a fatal dose in twenty minutes, unprotected, and they were almost two hours from the surface. Besides, standing orders were to keep working. Bring the body in at end of shift."

"What happened?" Cooper whispered it, in frightened fascination.

McQueen looked at him. "I don't know," he answered flatly.

"Don't know?"

"They didn't show up at end of shift. The radios weren't reliable, because there was so much hard radiation and metal dust in the atmosphere from the drilling, but we tried to call them for an hour. Nothing. And finally the supervisors sent me out on a scooter, to find out what had happened. Salvage the burrower," he added. "The equipment was expensive, and two were out of commission completely by then.

"I got there, and found them lying next to each other. Dead. They'd shut the burrower off, and parked it so it could be driven back up the cut. Marius's suit was ripped open across his shoulder and arm; you could see how the rock must have torn into it." He gestured, briefly, across his own chest. "Joanna was lying next to him. Her suit was fine. But she'd taken it off."

Cooper dug his fingers into the woolen blanket he was sitting on. Hard. "What did you do?"

McQueen's face was stony. "I took their breathing masks off, and their oxygen tanks. I put the gear in the burrower, and slaved it to follow the scooter. And I drove the scooter back up the cut."

Cooper was silent, feeling his gut clench. Joanna had died with Marius. Because they were kin.

But--the closeness they must have had. Family: tied to each other, genetically linked. So that she took her suit off, when Marius was dying. That close. What was it like, to know you were bound up with someone like that?

He wanted to be that close to someone. To McQueen.

"Were--" His voice was hoarse, and he stopped to clear his throat. "Were there any other kin, in your batch?"

McQueen looked down, at the deck. "I don't know," he said. "Most of us never tried to find out."

"I still want to," Cooper said, and heard the words shake. McQueen didn't answer. "Sir, I--" He remembered the fight in the asteroids. He could have died for McQueen then, even not knowing if they were kin or not. But he wanted to know. "Is it that--you wouldn't want to be?"

"No," McQueen said, very low. "It's not that."

Cooper didn't understand what it was, then. He would have asked, but the Colonel had already bent to open one of the desk drawers and was shuffling quickly through it for a sheet that he pulled out and handed to Cooper. Then he stood up and turned away, looking out the viewport.

Cooper looked from his commander to the paper in his hands. It was thick: official stationary, not a flimsy, with the American flag embossed at the top left corner, and the stylized test-tube-and-DNA symbol he remembered from the facility at the right. It was dated April 23, 2047, and the heading read _Statement of Manumission._

He glanced up again. "Manumission?"

The Colonel nodded, once, without turning around. "When my placement ended. The World Court banned indentured servitude in '53; you don't get the certificate any more. That's about the only thing that changed, though."

"Oh." Cooper watched him for a moment more, then began reading.

` This is to certify that the individual identified below, being an artificial person gestated in vitro, having satisfactorily completed training and acculturation in such facility as is approved for those purposes, and having further performed such labor as was required in reparation of costs of birth and maintenance, is now admitted to the status of legal adult, holding restricted citizenship in accordance with the relevant laws and statutes....`

He skipped the rest of the paragraph, as it got lost in legal gibberish, and looked further down. There was what he wanted.

``
    
    
               NAME:   McQueen, Tyrus Cassius
                SEX:   M
         BIRTH DATE:   April 9, 2040
        BIRTH PLACE:   Gestational and Educational Facility, Anchorage AK
          GENE POOL:   13-C
              BATCH:   K 9757
       GENETIC CODE:   ACGG GFDS BCFD ...
       

It went on for several lines. Cooper read through it, and then closed his eyes and remembered his own, code group by code group. Then he opened his eyes and read McQueen's again, carefully, comparing. Calculating distance. He'd been sitting on a bed the only other time he had ever done this, too, but then the room had been full of his batchmates, waiting, and some of them asleep. Now there was only McQueen.

The paper was damp, where his fingers had pressed, when he was done. He sat and stared at it, at the creases his hands had made in it. At his skin, and the bleak emptiness beyond.

McQueen was twenty-three. Almost four times as old as he was; Cooper had turned six a few days before they'd graduated. He wondered what the Anchorage facility had been like, whether McQueen had been taught the same lessons he had been. Had there been a window in that dormitory? Did it have bars?

He wasn't sure if there were birds in Alaska. He'd heard it was all ice, there.

He didn't look up when McQueen finally spoke. "Well?"

"We're not kin." He felt sick, and terribly heavy, like a dead bird made out of rock. The page had crumpled a little in his fingers, and he forced himself to focus on it again. Across the bottom, in smaller letters, ran another line of text: _?This information is on file and available for reference with the Human Genome Project--Subcommittee for In-Vitro Registration._ He stared at the words, numbly; after a moment he ground his thumb over the word _Human,_ blotting it out.

McQueen turned around then, and reached a hand forward, but Cooper shoved himself up from the bed and pushed the paper into the open fingers. Maybe it would have been better if he had never asked; then he could have hoped. Now he had nothing, again. He scowled and swung away toward the hatch.

"Sorry to bother you, sir. Thanks anyway." He jerked at the latch, got it open, and was halfway through when McQueen's hand landed on his shoulder. The sore one.

"There are over five million in-vitros in the galaxy, Hawkes," McQueen said quietly. "Just because we're not kin doesn't mean...you'll never find your family."

Yeah. Only he didn't have any idea where all those others were, and he couldn't exactly go looking. Here there was only him and McQueen, out of four thousand crew. And they weren't kin. McQueen was his squadron commander, that was all, and any of the 58th could say that. And they had kin, and Cooper had no one. He twisted out from under the restraining hand and stalked away.

He ended up back on the flight deck, slumped on the cool metal flooring with his back pressed against his cockpit. The only light came from the glass wall of the briefing room, above him, where a couple of swabbies were cleaning; but the glass deadened any sound of their voices, or the vacuum they were running over the floor. Where he was it was dark and still, and the rounded cap of the oxyfeed line dug into his back. He hugged his knees to his chest and shut his eyes.

He shouldn't have walked out on Colonel McQueen like that. It was--rude.

He'd known how unlikely it was, but--he hadn't realized how desperately he'd been hoping until he was halfway through the code groups, his gut aching more with each failed comparison. They both had blue eyes; that was a sign of some genetic similarity, wasn't it? But it wasn't enough. Not enough.

But he shouldn't have walked out like that. He pulled his knees tighter against the bleak despair and blew a long breath out, slowly, listening to the rushing whisper of the air between his lips.

He wasn't any worse off now than he had been before. They hadn't been kin when McQueen had gripped his hand on the drill field, or when they wouldn't fight each other the day the war began. It was just that he knew, now. But they were still the only in-vitros on board, McQueen the only one he had seen since the dormitory door had closed behind him.

McQueen was his commanding officer, like he was for all the 58th. But that meant something too. Not the connection he wanted, but still an important one. The Marines were important to McQueen, he knew, and he exhaled again, reassuring himself. He'd be the best Marine he could be, show the Colonel he was as good as any of the natural-borns in the squad. Better. 

He didn't go back to the wardroom until almost midnight. The squad was asleep, but someone had left his bedlamp on, its light supplementing the dim permanent glowstrip across the ceiling as he got undressed and crawled into his rack. He bunched the pillow up under his head and turned toward the wall, hoping he wouldn't dream.

#   #   #

In the early morning someone coughed above him, waking him, and he lay with his eyes closed for a few minutes, just resting. If he'd dreamed anything, he couldn't remember it. He wanted to go back to sleep, but the need for a piss was growing, and finally he gave in to it and got up. He was halfway to the head when he heard the hatch unseal behind him, and turned around to see McQueen swinging it open.

"Five-eight, shake a leg!" the Colonel shouted, and half the squad jerked bolt upright in their racks. "Head call, mess call, and I want to see you geared up and ready in the briefing room at 0730! Let's move!" He threw a quick assessing glance around the room; Cooper didn't even have time to collect himself and come to attention before the Colonel pulled the hatch to again and was gone. The others were clambering out of their racks, chattering with still-sleepy excitement; it was nearly seven, and Cooper was already up, so he smiled and beat the rush for the showers.

They crammed down a hurried breakfast in the mess and were tumbling into their seats in the briefing room as McQueen walked in and paused to survey them; his gaze seemed to catch every half-zipped flightsuit pocket and every mouthful of coffee that hadn't quite been swallowed yet. Cooper pulled himself up straighter in his chair and pushed his hair out of his eyes, trying to show himself ready.

"Okay," said McQueen crisply, "listen up. The _Saratoga_ 's been ordered to the Fornax Sector, to support the push to beat the chigs back from Tellus. Our orders are to fly patrol and long-range scout en route, and recon or offense as needed when we get there; the whole sector's hot. Meanwhile--West!" In the front row West's head snapped up, and McQueen had taken two steps to stand over him, hands on hips. "You got some place better to be, Lieutenant?"

"No, sir!"

"Then try not to look like you think you do." Blue eyes strafed them all. "We've got about three weeks before we reach alien-occupied space, but that is _not_ an excuse to take it easy! You're going to be flying six-hour patrols daily; I want you on deck at 0745 sharp, and you launch at eight. Clear?"

"Yes, sir!" they chorused.

"Okay. I won't be going out with you; I'm grounded on medical." There was a ripple of surprise through the squad at that, and Cooper blinked in dismay. The Colonel looked all right, except for the whitish area around his left eye; but Cooper remembered the blood-drenched bandaging, when they'd brought him in. "Vansen!"

"Sir."

"You're honcho for now. Try not to lose anybody. Your flight plan--" he pulled down a schematic screen and outlined it to them, a broad doubled curve in three dimensions that would quarter the space the _Saratoga_ was steaming her way through. "We're not expecting trouble, but we don't know how deeply the chigs may have penetrated. You see anything, you call it in! The 32nd is your backup, and they will be scrambled if you actually engage the enemy. The 133rd goes out when you come in, and you're their backup, so don't plan on drinking anything stronger than sodapop before eight pm.

"You come off patrol at 1400; the 133rd will relieve you on station. Park your planes, take ten minutes to use a real toilet, and report back here. I'm going to give you some new flight patterns, and you're going to drill them every day after you come off patrol: stuff they didn't teach you on Earth. There are ways to dodge the chigs, and by the time we get to Fornax you're going to be able to fly them in your sleep. Any questions?" He waited a bare second, and then barked, "Move out!"

And in fifteen minutes Cooper found himself in space, the rest of the squad peeling off one by one as Vansen called out their positions in the sensor net they were laying around the _Saratoga_. When she called his name he gunned his attitude jets and curved away. The rumble of the Hammerhead's engines throbbed against his spine, acceleration pressing him into the seat, and the space around his plane was as vast and empty as he had ever imagined. It was wonderful.

After an hour it was only quiet, though, the engine noise fading into familiarity, and he was glad for the occasional report or off-hand remark on the radio. The others were nothing but blips on the LIDAR, the _Saratoga_ a bigger blip far behind him, and following a pre-planned trajectory through silent emptiness and waiting for something to trigger an alarm wasn't much of a challenge, or exhilarating the way combat drills had been.

After two more hours he could feel himself stiffening up, and there were three still to go. He remembered McQueen telling him about wiggling his toes, and flexed his leg muscles, trying to work them isometrically, but it didn't help much. Flying was still wonderful, the endless black openness surrounding him, but it was also monotonous. Maybe tomorrow he could bring the music disk and the player aboard again. He didn't want an actual attack, but he wished something would happen.

Nothing did. Three hours later he exchanged recognition codes with Di Filippi of the 133rd and rejoined his squad as they headed in. His calves were cramping, and he was looking forward to getting out of the plane.

For ten minutes.

But the drills McQueen ran them through were everything the patrol hadn't been. He diagrammed the maneuvers in the briefing room, and then talked each of them through them step by step over the radio from the _Saratoga_ 's bridge, before letting them try them on their own: corkscrews that twisted against the spin of the chig ships and might let them dodge a lock-on even if they were outnumbered, feints that had sometimes let the 127th catch the enemy in their own weapons fire. Cooper listened intently, impressed, and tried to envision how the flight path would look, and how it would work in battle, and then fought the g-stress to pull it off himself, coming out of his spin panting, dizzy, and pleased.

When they'd each managed a couple of runs without losing control or ramming anybody else, McQueen launched a few empty cockpits and drilled them in retrieval, in case someone was shot down and managed to eject; the cockpits could manage a dead-stick landing if necessary, but there was no guarantee there'd be a habitable planet nearby. They'd practiced pickups before, of course, in lunar orbit, but not under the intensity of simulated combat that he was putting them through now, and they learned the hard way just how much of a drag the excess mass was on the towing plane. Cooper figured, if he was shot down, he'd be luckiest if he took a direct hit on the canopy; but someone had pulled McQueen's cockpit in, saving his life. So he practiced.

It was 1740 before McQueen let them come in again, and Cooper was starving for something more substantial than the high-protein, low-residue ration bars he had in the plane. He hit the showers with the others, glad to strip off a flightsuit that smelled by now of sweat and recycled air, and didn't mind being in the middle of the crowd as they piled into the mess hall. Nine hours of terse radio checks and status reports was enough; he was actually looking forward to the noise of human conversation.

The five of them pretty much filled a table, and the food was steaming hot and good: a beef stew and some kind of vegetable he didn't recognize. The milk tasted strange, though; he took a swallow and then grimaced, surprised. He'd always liked milk. Wang saw his expression and shook his head.

"Give up, Hawkes. Reconstituted just never tastes the same, and we won't see fresh milk for months. You want my advice? Have a Coke." He lifted his own glass and toasted Cooper with it.

"So," said Damphousse, "I guess this is the routine for the next couple of weeks. I sort of thought we'd be going right into combat."

"We are," Vansen told her. "It just takes a while to get there. McQueen's good," she added. "That last power-twist he showed us, that was something."

"It was something, all right," Wang said, and pulled his face into what looked like pain. "My butt is killing me. I thought he'd never let us land!"

"Hey, those drills could save your life next week. Don't knock 'em."

West shook his head. "They didn't save the 127th, did they?"

Cooper's voice collided with Vansen's as they both burst out at once, but she was louder. "The Angels were outnumbered eight to one, and they still fought the chigs to a standstill! They were the best there ever was, and I couldn't ask for a better commander. We're lucky to have him," she finished sharply, and Cooper overrode her last words with his own. "Colonel McQueen's a good pilot. Better than any of us. But, hey--" and he deliberately tried to match the scornful look West gave him sometimes-- "you don't like his drills, don't do them. We won't worry about saving _your_ ass." West flushed, and Cooper added, acidly, "Maybe you just hate taking orders from a wetbrain."

"All right, stop it," Damphousse snapped. "Hawkes, put a sock in it. And Nathan, don't even open your mouth." They all turned to her, and she went on, more quietly, "Look, we're a team now. We've got a good commander, and we need to know we can count on each other. And we can. Right?"

"Right," Wang said emphatically. He put a hand down flat on the middle of the table, and Phousse covered it with hers. Vansen reached out and took Cooper's hand in her own, bringing them both down onto Phousse's. "The 58th," she said, firmly.

"Yeah," Cooper agreed. Her hand on his, and Damphousse's underneath, warm and bony, pressed his between them. When West's came down on top, he felt it only as a slight increase of pressure.

"The 58th," West said. They kept their hands still a moment, and then, slowly, broke the pile and began eating again.

"Hey," said Wang, a little later. "You remember, Shane, early on in training, you said you wanted to join the 127th?" Vansen nodded. "Funny how it happens," he told her, thoughtfully. "McQueen ended up joining our squadron instead."

After they'd eaten they all wandered down to the bar they'd been told the Marines on board generally stuck to; it was nearly twenty hundred, and it didn't look as though they were going to be scrambled to support the 133rd against a surprise chig assault. Vansen grinned when she saw its name--Tun Tavern--outlined in neon on the wall, and started telling them a long story about the founding of the Marines three hundred years before. Cooper couldn't follow everything she was saying, but he liked the sound of her voice, cheerful and lively. By the time she finished, they had gotten drinks and found a table off to one side, where they could see the room. The viewport here was huge, almost six feet square, so that the open floor felt even more open. Cooper rocked his chair back, like he saw some others doing, and took a swallow of beer. At least it tasted right. The others were talking about the new maneuvers again, and he listened comfortably and joined in from time to time.

The place was filling up; there was a dart game going on in one corner, with a small crowd watching, and people standing at the bar because they couldn't find seats. Across the room someone started the jukebox playing, and a few couples drifted onto the open floor and began to dance. Cooper watched curiously, trying to work out the steps; they seemed pretty random.

Then he looked up as a Navy lieutenant came up to them. "Hi," the man said, smiling. "You guys new on board?"

"Yep. We're the 58th, just posted from Earth," Wang told him, and waved a hand around the table.

"I _thought_ so. You fought the Battle of the Belt!" He hooked a toe around a chair whose occupant had just gotten up and pulled it close, sitting down. "Welcome aboard the _Saratoga._ I'm Bill Meisner."

Wang introduced them all. Meisner was a thin man with thick red eyebrows and hair so short it looked like a red dusting across his scalp. He was attached to the supply staff, he said. "But I wanted to fly. Couldn't pass the physical." He took off his glasses, blinked at them, and said sadly, "Blind as a bat."

"You don't know what you're missing," Damphousse told him warmly. "It's like nothing else, being out there."

"I know!" Meisner assured her. "But we all do our part."

Cooper tilted his head. "Filing paperwork?"

Meisner pointed a finger at him. "Now don't go insulting the hard workers behind the lines, Marine," he said firmly, and Cooper couldn't tell if he was angry or not; his face didn't look it, but his voice was sharp. "You piss me off, and you just may find all your toilet paper requisitions going missing for the next month. File that!" Cooper didn't know what to say, but Meisner turned away without waiting for an answer. "Either of you ladies care to dance?"

Damphousse shook her head, indicating her still-full glass, but Vansen nodded and finished her drink in one swallow. "Love to."

As the two of them headed for the dance floor, Cooper looked dubiously at the others. "Can he do that? About the toilet paper?"

"Probably not," Wang told him somberly. "But I wouldn't push it. After all, we can't all be heroes."

They stayed another hour or so, talking and nursing their drinks. Meisner didn't seem angry when he came back to the table, and he stayed and told them stories about the _Saratoga;_ he'd been stationed on her for two years, and some of his yarns had Cooper smiling and the others laughing out loud. He danced once with Damphousse and several more times with Vansen, but never with any of the others, and West and Wang didn't seem surprised that he didn't ask them. Cooper had noticed that most of the dancing couples were a man and a woman. By the time the night watch was almost over most of the 58th were yawning, though, and they said goodnight to Meisner and headed back to the wardroom to hit the sack.

The next day was the same as that one; Cooper figured they'd all be pretty much the same until the _Saratoga_ reached the front lines. Unless they met up with a chig scouting party, or somebody launched a new offensive, or something. Most of the squad went off to play cards and watch TV in the rec room that evening, but Cooper's back and legs were stiff and aching, and after a couple of hands he'd had enough of sitting still. He ducked back to the wardroom for shorts and sneakers, and headed out to the gym for a good long run.

The locker room was empty; changing clothes quickly, he dumped his flightsuit and boots into a locker and headed out the open doorway to the track. He did the first lap at an easy jog, warming up, and then burst into a sprint for the length of the straightaway just to feel the burn before settling into a loping run he knew he could maintain for a long time. It was good to be moving.

The ceiling overhead was high, and it had been painted a pale blue, maybe in an effort to make it look like sky. Floodlamps were bolted to it, though, destroying any possibility of illusion. He squinted up at them curiously, remembering Damphousse's remark about claustrophobia. He didn't mind the lack of viewports most places, and he still liked flying even when it was dull, but he was going to miss the sunlight, and real wind. The air was cooler in here than in the rest of the ship, and the ventilators blew a steady, gentle breeze the length of the huge space, but although it felt good across the skin of his face and chest it wasn't the same.

The track was oval, a little over a hundred yards on its long axis. On the right side, just past the entry he'd come through, thirty feet or so of the wall was glass, with a view into the weight room. There were a few people in there, mostly working on the machines; he glanced in briefly as he began his third lap, and thought about doing some lifting too, after he finished his run. The open area in the track's center was striped and swirled with several sets of lines in different colors: blue, red, green, and yellow. He recognized the red ones as football markings, and the blue ones as defining a set of basketball courts, one alongside the other, but he didn't know what the others were. The two basketball courts on the ends of the row, tucked into the turns of the track, had hoops erected, and there were groups of people on them, bouncing balls. At the end near the entry and the window onto the weight room three men seemed to be just fooling around, laughing together and all trying for baskets more or less at random, but the group on the other court was playing a real game, five on each side in different-colored shirts. He watched them curiously as he approached and circled them on each lap, wondering what the rules were and if he'd be good at it. He could throw a grenade accurately up to twenty-five yards, but he'd never tried throwing a ball that big through a hoop, or bouncing it the way the players did as they dodged one another.

He'd finished a few more laps, liking the feel of his lungs working, his muscles flexing and surging as he ran, when he saw that one of the three men on the other court had stopped playing, and was watching him. Cooper returned the look, warily, as he went by, and the man reached for one of his friends and yanked him close. Cooper could see him say something into the other's ear, both of them staring after him now.

He was too far away to hear the man's words, but he didn't need to. He knew that look. Glancing down at himself, he saw that his shorts were riding a little low: low enough to show that he didn't have a belly-button, a human navel. He knew what the natural-borns were saying to each other. He sped up as he came out of the turn onto the straightaway, leaving them behind him, and wondered if he should leave.

No. He was a Marine, wasn't he? He had a right to be here. Anyway, he'd taken on three humans once before, and he'd been winning when the police showed up; he could probably handle them, if it came to that. Unless the other ten joined in.

All three of them were watching him when he came around to face them again. He jogged down the track, keeping a close watch on them without actually meeting their gaze, and listening as well for any change in the note of the cheers and calls among the players behind him. But they only stood there, eyeing him hostilely; one was bouncing a ball slowly, two-handed, as they turned to follow his passage around the corner of the court. Cooper kept his breathing steady, and slid a glance forward to check that the exit to the locker room was unblocked; if they rushed him he might be better off bolting for it, getting into an enclosed and crowded space where his attackers would get in each other's way.

The passage was open, but Cooper's eye was caught by a movement just past it, that he could see through the window into the weight room. Someone was getting up from the leg press, stretching carefully, and although Cooper was still a good distance away and the other's back was to him, the shape of his body, in grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt, was familiar, and the close-cropped greying hair. McQueen. Cooper pushed himself forward, hoping that the Colonel would turn around, and forgetting momentarily to keep watch on the humans clustered together to his left.

He barely saw the ball, a huge orangey-brown smear erupting into his vision, and then it slammed into his temple and he cried out, nearly falling as the impact spun him around; he caught himself on his knees and one hand and threw himself upright again, gasping and dizzy. The whole side of his face was burning and his sight was red-streaked and blurry, but he knew where they were, and screaming in fury he squinted through his right eye and lunged.

One of them got in a kidney punch, and he screamed again and twisted to kick out sideways. The one who'd hit him staggered back, and Cooper slammed the heel of his hand into the face of the next, but when he tried to follow up the man was jerked back out of his reach, and someone else shoved between them and deflected his blow. "Break this shit up!" McQueen's voice bellowed furiously.

Cooper froze, and then lowered his hands. His vision was clearing, now, and he could see McQueen glaring at them. The game had stopped on the other court, and people were staring from the entry and the weight room window, too. "Sorry, sir," he managed, and moved back a step, panting.

The three natural-borns were poised on their toes in indignant surprise, but when Cooper said "sir" they hesitated, and he saw their weight settle. McQueen rounded on them.

"I'm Lieutenant Colonel McQueen, with the Marine 58th. Who are you, and what the hell's going on here?"

The one who'd been bouncing the ball, before, glanced at his friends and then lifted his chin a little. Cooper was savagely glad to see his nose running blood.

"Seaman Perlick, sir, and Seaman Apprentices Hasib--" he gestured at the man closest to him-- "and Evans. He just attacked us, sir!" Perlick's voice was filled with earnest indignation, and Cooper snarled; McQueen said sharply, "Hawkes!" and turned to him.

"Well, Lieutenant?"

Cooper's mouth was full of saliva; he spat, and tasted blood. "That bastard threw the ball straight at me. Sir."

McQueen looked back to Perlick. "Is that true, Seaman?"

"No, sir!" Perlick shook his head, then winced and wiped at the blood on his lip. "We were just shooting some hoops, that's all. Evans missed my pass, and I guess the nipple-neck here got his face in the way." McQueen frowned, and Perlick added guilelessly, "Hey, I've got nothing against tanks, sir. I was glad when I heard we'd had a couple of them posted aboard. Maybe they can make up for the way they hid under the bed during the AI War, you know?"

Fury clenched Cooper's chest and he jerked a fist up, but before he could smash it through Perlick's teeth McQueen knocked it down again with a numbing chop to his wrist. "That's _enough,_ Lieutenant," he snapped, and the angry warning in his glare nailed Cooper to the deck. The Colonel watched him a moment longer, until Cooper let his fist relax and gave a tiny, grudging nod of acknowledgement; then he looked back to the humans.

"All right," he said firmly. "If it was an accident, then I'm sure Lieutenant Hawkes will accept your apology."

Cooper twitched in surprise, and Perlick burst out, "Apology!" His friends echoed him angrily. "Sir, he attacked us!"

"In a misunderstanding caused by your carelessness, Seaman." McQueen's voice was harsh. "Now unless you want me to bring all four of you before the officer of the watch for brawling, I suggest you apologize immediately."

Perlick scowled, cut his eyes sideways at Cooper, and muttered, "I'm sorry my ball hit you, Lieutenant."

Cooper didn't want the Colonel to give him that glare again. "I accept your apology."

"Then this incident is over," McQueen told them all curtly. "Seamen, you may as well get back to your game. Lieutenant, I think you've had enough exercise for today." He took Cooper's upper arm in a pinching grip and shoved him around.

As McQueen almost frog-marched him toward the doorway, Cooper craned to listen behind them. They hadn't taken more than a couple of steps before he heard an explosively-whispered "Son of a _bitch!_ " from Perlick, and knew the human had seen McQueen's navel, above the neck of his t-shirt. He sneered vindictively to himself, but didn't let it show; McQueen still looked angry.

The Colonel got him into the locker room and pushed him toward the sinks. "Put some cold water on your face, Hawkes. You're going to have a hell of a bruise."

Cooper splashed some onto himself, obediently; it did feel good. His lip was split too, and he could tell his neck was going to stiffen up some, but nothing worse than that. He rinsed his mouth out and spat again, into the sink. "He did do it on purpose, sir."

"I know," McQueen told him. "But it wouldn't do any good to pursue it. He'll learn better in time." He watched Cooper dry his face, and added, "You'll have to learn better, too. I suppose we're lucky you didn't have a crowbar handy."

Cooper jerked his eyes up from the wad of paper towels and stared; McQueen was smiling at him, just a little. Like he wasn't angry any more--like he was almost pleased. Cooper hesitantly offered a small smile in return. "I think he learned better the minute you turned your back on him, sir."

"Which still leaves you," McQueen told him, but he was still smiling, faintly.

"Why did you let him get away with saying stuff like that?" Cooper demanded. "I mean, you fought in the AI War!"

McQueen shook his head. "You can't argue someone out of prejudice. It's how we conduct ourselves as Marines that will make the difference." He tossed Cooper a towel from the pile in the corner. "Grab a shower and I'll buy you a drink, Hawkes. We could probably both use one."

McQueen wasn't angry with him any more. Cooper rushed through the shower with a glow of anticipation warmer than the water. McQueen was waiting for him, wanting to buy him a drink, and probably sit and talk for a while, too, like they had back on Earth. He dressed quickly, caught up his stuff, and found McQueen at the gym's entrance, back in uniform too. He grinned at the Colonel and fell in with him, down the passageway toward the bar.

The place wasn't very full, an hour or so into the night watch, but Cooper wanted to be out of earshot of the natural-borns. They leaned briefly on the bar to order drinks, but once they got them he headed for a table off against the side wall, and McQueen didn't object. Maybe he wanted to be able to talk privately too, Cooper thought, pleased. He tossed his gear under the table next to McQueen's, and pulled his chair in close.

McQueen had gotten a scotch, so Cooper had asked for one too. It smelled sharp and good, but when he took a swallow he choked in pained surprise; it burned in his cut lip and seared its way down his throat, and he coughed and gagged. McQueen grinned sympathetically and rescued the glass from his hand. "Better stick to beer, Hawkes," he said, and called over to the bartender for a bottle.

Cooper swigged it gratefully, the cool tartness soothing the scotch's burn, and watching as McQueen sipped at his own. "How can you drink that stuff?" He was still blinking water from his eyes.

"Acquired taste," McQueen told him. "Don't be in any hurry to acquire it. In-vitros tend to develop addictions easily; a flaw in the genetic design, they think."

Cooper shook his head disbelievingly. "Not to that stuff." Pain twinged through his neck as he moved, and he rubbed it ruefully, then felt at the tender swelling in his face. The beer bottle was cold; he rolled it over his cheek and temple, wincing.

"You okay?" McQueen asked, and Cooper nodded. "Take a good hot shower tomorrow morning, too," the Colonel told him. "The seals of the flight helmet press down on your shoulders, even in null-g; it won't do your neck muscles any good."

Cooper had realized that already; he wasn't looking forward to the next day's patrol. But that reminded him of what the Colonel had told them in that first briefing, the day before. "Sir," he asked, hesitantly, "you're grounded?"

McQueen nodded, once. "Yes."

"Permanently?"

"So they tell me."

"You can't _ever_ fly again?" Cooper remembered sitting on the edge of the drill field, gazing up into the depths of cloud-dappled blueness, while McQueen described to him what it was like to fly. Remembered the first time he'd cut loose in a real plane, how the ground had hurled itself over his head and he'd pitched outward into the sky. And in space, where there was no wind, and no ground, and no blueness, only the vast open expanse, and himself like a bird hanging in the very middle of it all. McQueen could never have that again?

"I'm sorry," he offered helplessly, and McQueen's eyes softened on him.

"I had twelve years of it," he told Cooper. "Nothing can take that away."

Twelve years. Cooper nodded, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a Marine that long, to be over twenty years old. McQueen was always so sure of himself, self-collected even when he was angry, and Cooper remembered seeing him arguing with the human officers, crisply and confidently, back at Loxley. Cooper'd screamed outrage at natural-borns plenty of times, but he'd never been able to talk to them like McQueen did, so that they listened with respect. He watched McQueen, wondering if he could learn to do that: not just when they didn't know what he was, like he'd tried to keep them from knowing on the streets, but even when they did. How long had it taken McQueen to learn?

He wondered what McQueen had been like when he was young, and remembered gazing through barred windows with a feeling he hadn't recognized, all those years ago, as longing. But McQueen had been in Anchorage, not Philadelphia, and Greg had described the north to him once. He put his elbows on the table and leaned in a little, lowering his voice. "Are there birds in Alaska, sir?"

"Birds? Of course there are." McQueen tilted his head inquiringly. "Why?"

Cooper hunched a shoulder self-consciously. What if the Colonel thought it was stupid? "In the facility...I used to watch this bird, sometimes. Through the dormitory window. Flying, you know; up high. Only Alaska--somebody told me, once, there's nothing but ice up there. Is that true?"

"Oh." McQueen paused, took a slow swallow of his scotch and lowered it again. "No. It's not true." After a moment he pushed the glass aside, resting his folded arms on the table and gazing down at them.

"The dormitories faced south, toward the city, but from the exercise yard we could see Mount McKinley. There were other mountains around it, but McKinley was the tallest." His voice was quiet, thoughtful; maybe a little sad, Cooper thought, and leaned closer. He wanted to reach forward, touch McQueen's wrist, but he didn't want to interrupt; he exhaled, softly, instead.

"I would look at it, sometimes, during physical training," McQueen told him. "The mountains changed color through the year: pinkish-red, and green, and brown, but the peak was always white." He flicked a glance up at Cooper and smiled a little, wryly. "I remember I liked the winter, because it was white where we were, too, and I thought that might be like being at the top of the mountain. When they placed us, shipped us off--I must have been in space for forty or fifty hours before I really believed that I was higher than the mountaintop." He shook his head a little, and sat back in his chair. "Snow's the only thing I miss in space, Hawkes."

Cooper nodded slowly. He didn't miss anything from the facility, except his batchmates, and they wouldn't be there any more anyway. He'd rather go hungry and filthy on the streets than live under the monitors again. And he didn't like snow, not since the first winter after he'd escaped. But he was trying to imagine looking out the window, between the bars, and seeing the mountain there; not just sometimes, coming and going like the bird, but always. Colored and white, and rearing steeply up through the sky, into the wind and the cold. If he'd been in the Anchorage facility like McQueen, he thought, he'd have tried to climb it when he got out.

"Yeah," he muttered, not meaning the snow, but the way they had both longed, inchoately, for the sky. And McQueen's eyes, gentle on him, seemed to understand.

They just sat for a while, silently together. Cooper took another mouthful of beer and held it, letting it cool the heat in his face from the inside. Then he swallowed, and stuck a finger in his mouth to feel the inside of his cheek. His teeth had caught the thin skin there, and the flesh was raw.

"You didn't loosen any teeth, did you?" McQueen asked, and he shook his head gingerly.

"Nah. Just sore." McQueen was watching him, and he remembered the Colonel's glare, on him as well as Perlick and the others. "I guess I shouldn't've laid into them like that, huh, sir?"

McQueen frowned, and shook his head. "I understand why you did. But here, now--no. You shouldn't have. We're at war, Hawkes. Save it for the enemy."

Cooper shrugged moodily. Ever since he'd realized what the monitors had done to Suzanne, would do to him, he'd pretty much thought of natural-borns as the enemy. But he knew, now, that that wasn't true. Some of them were okay. There were still ones like Perlick around, but there were Wang and Vansen and Damphousse, too. His friends: real friends, not like Greg had been.

"You went after them because you were angry," McQueen told him. "But just lashing out like that doesn't do you any good. What if you'd wiped the floor with them? You'd be in the brig now, facing charges." He leaned forward and caught Cooper's eyes with a gaze as intense as his furious glare had been, before, but he wasn't angry. His voice was compelling, emphatic; Cooper leaned forward too, listening hard. " _Use_ that anger, Hawkes, that fire. Focus it, make it work for you."

Focus it. Cooper wasn't sure how to do that, and sometimes just going berserk had been the only thing that had saved his life: a couple of times when he was outnumbered and surrounded he'd erupted into a blind screaming frenzy of violence, and both times he'd managed to scare off the gang before they figured out how to bring him down. But in four years on the streets he'd never managed more than a precarious living, with one hand on his knife and never letting any of them find out where he slept. McQueen had been promoted all the way to lieutenant colonel, and he talked with humans on their own terms.

"Focus it," he repeated aloud, admiringly. "Like you did, right, sir?"

But McQueen looked at him and shook his head, briefly, once. "I never had that kind of passion, Hawkes. Just a--dogged determination, I suppose." He smiled at Cooper, a tiny movement of his mouth, and to Cooper's astonishment he looked wistful, too. "Don't lose that fire, Hawkes. You can do great things with it, when you know how."

"How?" Cooper demanded. He couldn't imagine doing more than McQueen had. And he knew McQueen had a fire too. He'd seen it in the other in-vitro's eyes when McQueen had yelled at him, exhausted and furious, after Pags's funeral, and other times when their eyes had met and McQueen had smiled, a secret tank smile just for him. McQueen did things Cooper couldn't imagine being able to do, and he wanted to learn.

But McQueen shook his head, still smiling. "I can't tell you that. You'll have to find out for yourself. You will, though."

Cooper subsided reluctantly. If the Colonel said he could learn on his own, then he could. But he still wanted to know how McQueen had done it. He sighed, and drank the last few swallows of his beer; as he put the bottle down he yawned, suddenly. It was the first drink he'd had in a long time, except at the reception, and the beer was stronger than the champagne had been. 

McQueen grinned, and glanced at his watch. "It's getting late, Hawkes. You should turn in."

"Now?" He didn't want to; he wanted to stay here, the two of them together. He could get some coffee. "It's not that late," he protested. "I'm not tired!" Besides, they didn't have a curfew here, like they'd had at Loxley; he could show up any time. The whole squad had stayed out almost this late the night before, and after he'd asked McQueen for his genetic code he hadn't gone back to the wardroom until practically the start of midwatch. He said so, and McQueen frowned.

"All the more reason to make an early night tonight, Hawkes. I don't want you flying when you're tired, not when you don't have to. Once we're in combat you'll be glad of all the sleep you can get."

"Do you know when that'll be, sir?" Cooper asked, and McQueen answered roughly, "It could be tomorrow. So get some rest."

They were through the swinging doors of the bar and in the passageway, and McQueen was about to head off toward his own quarters, when Cooper spoke again, abruptly. "Colonel McQueen?"

McQueen turned around. "Yes?"

The bruising had started to come out on Cooper's face; his skin felt hot and stretched, like it was too small for his cheekbone. "I'm sorry I walked out on you, sir. The other night."

McQueen studied him for a moment, wordlessly. The Colonel's gaze seemed to brush across his skin, raising the hairs on his arms and making him intensely aware of the beating of his heart, his aching temple.

"It's all right, Lieutenant," McQueen said finally. "It was a--disappointment for me, too." He nodded and turned away again, and Cooper watched him go.

A disappointment. If they'd been kin, there would have been a special link between them, a genetic bond that tied them together even when they were apart. Like the natural-borns had, with their families. Maybe he'd have understood better how to do what McQueen had told him to, how to be as focussed and strong as McQueen was. But they weren't kin. He could never--share what McQueen was, like that. Bitterly disappointed, Cooper trudged off toward the wardroom.

The main light was off when he arrived, just a couple of the squad half-awake in their racks to grunt sleepily at him; but the next morning he'd barely stumbled, yawning, into the shower before Vansen yelped and grabbed at his chin, turning his face to the light.

"Jesus, Hawkes, what the hell did you run into last night?"

He pulled away from her, wincing; his head ached fiercely and his neck was stiff and sore. Switching on the shower as hot as he could stand it, he stuck his head under the water, then turned around and let it beat down on his shoulders. "Went for a run," he told her shortly, and watched sidelong as West, by the entry, bent to pull off the underwear he slept in. He was sure the human was listening. "Bunch of sailors decided they didn't like the tank's face; they tried to smash it in with a basketball."

"Are you okay?" asked Damphousse, and he grunted and reached for a palmful of soap.

"I'll live."

Wang, up early, had been vigorously rubbing shampoo through his hair when the others had come in. He'd paused when Vansen had exclaimed, and Cooper thought his expression had looked concerned; now he eyed Cooper, nodding thoughtfully. "But will they?" he asked. The others turned to stare at him, surprised, but Cooper just grinned caustically at them all and finished soaping himself up.

Vansen looked from Wang back to him, shaking her head as she pulled off the cap that kept her hair dry. "If Colonel McQueen finds out you've been fighting, Hawkes, you could be in trouble. Technically, we're in a war zone. And unless you show up for the briefing in your flight helmet, he's going to find out," she added.

"He knows," Cooper told her. "He was there; he broke it up." Deliberately catching West's eyes, he said pointedly, "I guess us tanks stick together, huh?" West looked away, not answering, and ducked under the showerhead farthest from him.

Cooper was the last one to finish, lingering under the water as long as he could. When he finally joined the others pulling on their flightsuits by the lockers, Vansen tossed him something small, that rattled as he caught it. "Ketoprofen, six milligrams each," she said briskly. "Take two now, and two more halfway through the shift; they'll help your head, and the muscle ache. And drink lots of water."

He turned the little bottle of pills in his hand, thinking. He fought for them, like he'd decided to that night in the cemetery on Earth, but they fought for him, too. He wondered what West would have done, if he'd been in the gym the night before; the human hadn't looked at him since that quick, uneasy glance in the shower. "Thanks."

"No problem," she told him. "I won't need them for a couple of weeks yet." He didn't understand why Damphousse chuckled at that, slanting a grin at him, but he dry-swallowed a couple of the tablets and tucked the bottle safely in his sleeve pocket as they headed out for chow. Colonel McQueen didn't mention Cooper's bruised face at the briefing before they took off, but he met Cooper's eyes as he summarized what the 32nd had reported on their shift, and nodded at him briefly. Cooper straightened in his seat, feeling the headache recede.

The days kept on like that: patrol, drill, and then free time in the evening. After the first week or so, the drills stopped; McQueen said he didn't want them getting overtrained. Cooper started running a couple of miles on the track before dinner most days; his duty time was spent sitting on his butt, and he didn't want to lose endurance. Sometimes he would go back in the evening and lift, too. He didn't see Perlick and his friends again, but he kept a wary eye out. Once Colonel McQueen was on the track when he arrived, and they ran a few laps together, talking about the drills they'd been doing and the places McQueen had lived, on Earth; but although Cooper went back at the same time the next day, McQueen wasn't there.

Other than that he spent most of his free time with the squad, in the rec room or the bar, or sometimes in the gym as well. They taught him basketball, which he turned out to be not too bad at, and because he was the tallest they made him the center and challenged the 32nd to a match. They lost that game, but they almost won the next one. There was a movie theater on board too, and sometimes some of the squad would go, but Cooper didn't like the movies. Silent in rows in a dark room, watching pictures of natural-borns on a screen; it was too much like lessons, and he kept twitching, expecting a monitor at his elbow. After the first time, he stayed away. Watching the TV in the rec room was different, though; the room was bright and there were people talking and moving around, and it was okay. He liked watching sports, especially with Wang, who would get excited and pound his hand on the chair or Cooper's arm, explaining the plays as fast as he could talk.

They ran into Meisner there a few days later. Cooper was watching a football game with the others, trying to see how the players spread out and coordinated with each other on the field; Wang was cheering one team, and West and Damphousse were cheering the other, but he was just watching both of them. Vansen wasn't too interested, though, and when Meisner came up to say hello she went to sit at a table with him, talking.

When the game ended, Wang and West were still arguing about whether somebody had broken a rule ten minutes before. Damphousse leaned forward and turned the TV off. "Give it up, Paul. They'd have lost anyway."

"Lost?" Wang demanded, outraged. "They only lost because the ref was blind! Faciano was miles off-side!"

"Like hell," retorted West, and they were at it again. Damphousse rolled her eyes and turned to Cooper. "They'll go on for hours. Hey--" She looked at him thoughtfully and began to smile. "You know how to play canasta?"

"What's that?"

"I guess that's a no," she said. "Want to learn? It's a card game."

"I've played poker. I'm not very good at it." He'd learned pretty quickly not to gamble, after the first few games on the street had lost him most of the money he'd managed to steal, instead of winning him anything. He'd tried cheating, but he wasn't good enough at that either, although he was pretty sure some of the humans he'd been playing against were.

"Canasta's better. Come on, I haven't played in years. My mother taught me; we used to have tournaments all along our block back home, when I was a kid. Come on, I've got a couple of decks in my locker."

It might be interesting, and anyway the football game was over. "Sure."

"Great. Look, get me a Coke, will you? I'll go get the cards; I'll be back in a minute." She was up and gone, so he went to the soda machine and swiped his drink card through the scanner, punching for a Coke for her. She'd pay him back later; they were all pretty good about that. He found a seat at a table, and in the next minute Wang and West were pulling up chairs next to him.

"Settle anything?" he asked, and Wang snorted.

"You wait 'til next year," he told West, who just grinned. Wang looked around. "Where'd Phousse go?"

"To get some cards from her locker. She's going to teach me canasta."

West's eyes lit up. "She plays canasta?"

"Oh, canasta," said Wang dismissively. "You want a real card game, try bridge."

"Bridge?" West's voice was incredulous. "My great-aunt plays bridge!"

"Well, then your great-aunt's a better card player than you'll ever be," Wang told him. "And a better football player too, I'll bet." And that started them off again; Cooper smiled and sat back to wait for Damphousse.

She came back in ten minutes or so, pulled up a chair and nodded thanks when Cooper pushed the can of Coke toward her. But she had a strange expression on her face: laughing a little, but looking uncomfortable too. "Man, oh man...."

"What's up?" Wang asked her, and she looked around at the three of them.

"Did any of you happen to notice when Shane left?"

Cooper hadn't even realized she had gone, but now he glanced around and didn't see her. The others were shaking their heads.

"Me neither. But I just walked in on her and Meisner in the wardroom--um--"

"No!" said Wang, and laughed. "Vansen?"

"In flagrante."

"What?" Cooper asked, confused, and they all turned to him.

"They were--making love," Damphousse told him, and Wang grinned again and added, "Screwing," as if it were an explanation.

Making love--natural-born sexing. Cooper remembered the film, right before he'd run away from the facility, and the time Vansen had hit him on the way to Mars. Damphousse was frowning. "She barely knows him!" she said, and her voice sounded angry.

"Oh, come on," Wang told her. "He's a nice guy; we could be dead tomorrow. More power to her, if she wants to have some fun. What's the big deal?"

"Maybe not to you. But I think it should mean more than that. It's--such an intimate thing to do, you know?"

Cooper listened curiously; he'd never thought about what sexing could mean. He liked sexing himself, and it had been fun, like Wang said, doing it with his batchmates. But they'd known each other, too, better than he figured anyone could know anyone, except for kin.

"Phousse is right," said West. He sounded thoughtful, and a little sad; after a moment he put his hand on his chest, where he wore the photo locket under his flightsuit. He didn't seem to realize he had done it. "Making love is special," he said slowly.

Wang made a face that looked like a frown and a smile at the same time. "So I guess there's no chance of you and me having a little fun, huh, Phousse?"

She glared at him, but she was laughing too. "You better be joking, Paul. I got a guy back home, you know."

"Yeah, I know," he said, and now he was just smiling, and so was she. Cooper looked from one to the other of them, not sure what the exchange had meant, and then at West again, who was still gazing pensively at nothing.

"Anyway." Damphousse popped the tab on her soda and put two packs of cards on the table. "You ready to learn canasta, Coop?"

West's eyes jerked back to her and widened. "You walked in on them--and just went on through to your locker and got the cards?" He sounded almost shocked, and Damphousse raised an eyebrow at him.

"Well, I'd already interrupted them, hadn't I? And besides, I'm not giving up the first chance at canasta I've had in months." She started shuffling the decks together. "We each get a hand of fifteen; jokers and deuces are wild. The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards, okay?"

Cooper wound up being as bad at canasta as he had been at poker, but when Damphousse found out West liked the game as much as she did, she lost interest in teaching and settled down to a heated contest with him. Cooper watched for a while, but card games were dull unless he was playing. Wang had gone off to log into the computer net, so he got himself a soda and sat for a while, thinking.

He'd pretty much gathered already that the natural-borns didn't sex where anyone could see; there was the time he'd watched Vansen and someone, back in training, and they'd moved away when they realized he was there. And in the barracks, and now in the wardroom, nobody ever sexed themselves until after the light was out, and they were always pretty quiet. Maybe that was why none of them ever sexed together, too; because the rest of the squad might be able to see. He'd always been kind of sorry for that; he would have liked to watch, to see if they did it the same way the humans in the film had. They were the only ones he'd ever seen sexing, and he was curious. Maybe he could ask Vansen, later.

"Such an intimate thing to do," Damphousse had said. Sexing himself felt good, and it was relaxing, but it wasn't anything more than that. Sexing with his batchmates...he remembered when he and Suzanne had discovered it accidentally, and how scared they'd been. But after that: it felt good, sure, but thinking about it now--yes, it had been intimate, sometimes, too. Suzanne smiling down at him as she rubbed, and Ephraim's back arching, eyes shut as his penis jerked in Cooper's hand. He'd done it most with them. He hadn't ever sexed with Baxter; the thought of those nervous, twitchy hands on him just made him want to knock them aside and do it himself. Just with the batchmates he had--liked the most.

West had said making love was special. Remembering his batchmates, Cooper knew sexing could be special too, even for tanks. He remembered the dream he'd had, the first night on the _Saratoga,_ when Ephraim had gotten into bed with him, lain down on top of him; they hadn't sexed, but the urge had been there, behind the quiet comfort. And if somehow Ephraim weren't dead, if they met somewhere again...he imagined running his fingers down his batchmate's stomach, through the pubic curls, and how Ephraim's face would look as he did it. Special. Not just because it was more fun than doing it by himself, although it was.

He was impatient for the lights to be turned off that night, irritated at the human rules that kept his hands off his cock until the wardroom was almost dark, except for the constant, pallid glow of the ceiling strip, and everyone was supposed to be asleep. It was silly, when he could hear Damphousse two places over doing the same thing. But it wasn't worth getting them mad at him, and he still wasn't sure if she and Wang had been angry at each other or not, earlier, so it was better not to risk it. But it was all right now, and he slid his hand down under the covers to hold his cock, warm and hard in his grip, and rub it gently. It was dry, and he stopped to spit on his palm twice, until he was leaking enough semen that his hand slid more easily, and the hot urgency was building in his crotch. He caught his breath, trying to keep quiet, and remembered suddenly how Cara had thrown a pillow at him and Ephraim once, for waking her up.

Ephraim had been sitting next to him on the bed, watching his reactions closely as he rubbed Cooper's cock in one hand and his balls in the other, slowly enough that Cooper had grunted and told him to go faster. And he had just smiled, and pinched a nipple. Cooper pinched one now with his free hand, hard, and his hips bucked as he imagined Ephraim's fingers on him instead of his own.

But Ephraim was dead. The thought jolted him, and the heated tension soured, his hand slowing. Remembering Ephraim was no good.

But he wanted to be touched. In the dream, Ephraim had pressed his whole body against Cooper's back: penis nudging his ass, hands on his shoulders, soft breath ruffling the hair above his navel. Cooper's skin ached at the memory.

But then it hadn't been Ephraim. It had been McQueen. When he had turned over, and McQueen had looked down at him, not smiling, just all his body resting against Cooper's own. Cooper shut his eyes in the dimness and remembered that pressure, rubbing one hand hard down his ribs and across his stomach while the other one moved faster on his cock, imagining McQueen, now. Warm and alive, and touching him.

He couldn't help one choked cry when he finished, although he was trying to be quiet, trying not to offend the humans. He panted through his mouth as the throbs of pleasure slowly faded, and the mental image did too, until he was alone in the rack, and nothing was touching him except the sheet and blanket, and his own hand. Semen puddled on his stomach, and he rubbed it in, absently.

He wondered if Damphousse had thought about her friend, the "guy back home," while she did it. If Meisner had touched Vansen the way she wanted him to. He hoped so.

#   #   #

He watched Colonel McQueen a little more closely, in the next morning's briefing. McQueen was shorter than Ephraim, more muscular, and he didn't move as smoothly as Ephraim had. But part of that was probably because of his injuries; he was using his left hand, now, but he still carried himself a little stiffly. His voice had a slight huskiness that Cooper liked, that kept even the orders he barked out from sounding entirely brusque. And his gaze was like hands clamped on each side of Cooper's head, when he caught Cooper's eyes and held the stare; McQueen's attention was intense and complete. Not threatening, like the monitors' was in his memory; even when McQueen was bawling him out for something, Cooper knew that McQueen was seeing him. _Him,_ not an error to be erased. McQueen was a tank, too.

And he was so sure of himself, so confident in the humans' world. Cooper couldn't imagine the Colonel twisting his hands nervously together the way Baxter had fidgeted, or going berserk with rage the way Cooper had in the gym. Or panicking the way he had in the Belt, when McQueen had shocked him out of it and saved his life. McQueen kept himself focussed, like he'd told Cooper to. He thought about that as they were launching, and resolved to pay as much attention to his scans as he thought McQueen would, if he could still fly. Must have done, when he was with the Angels.

Even so, he caught his thoughts drifting away into the void more than once. But then, with two hours left on station, a faint flicker teased his eye; he tensed and squinted at the screen, then hit the radio with one hand as he twisted for better resolution with the other, switching to squadwide broadcast.

"This is Jack of Spades; I've got a bogey on the horizon. Bearing one-niner mark alpha three six, coming in slow." The LIDAR was fuzzy, the unknown ship almost at maximum range, and he couldn't clear the image no matter what he tried. "Can't ID."

Vansen was right there. "King of Hearts, shift course fifteen degrees to support; triangulate and identify. I'll notify Queen Six."

West acknowledged the order, and Wang's voice asked, "You want us to move in?"

"Negative, negative! Stay in position; it could be a feint to draw us out." There was a click on the line as she changed frequencies, reporting the contact to McQueen.

West was on his screen too, fifty MSKs to port. "I can barely see it, Jack of Spades. Only one?"

"Affirmative." Cooper licked his lips. The chigs normally flew in groups; were more of them hiding somewhere, about to attack? But it was kind of slow to be an attacker, and the blur was clearing a little; it didn't look like a chig ship, as far as he could tell. At least, not like any they had been briefed on. He brought up his targeting system, locking in.

"Where are the others?" West demanded. He sounded tense, too.

"Might not be a chig," Cooper told him. "I'm going to challenge. Watch my six."

"Roger that."

He accelerated a little, coming closer in an arc that would take him above and athwart the other but that also canted his jets for the trickiest of the evasive twists McQueen had taught them, and he kept one hand on the fire control as he switched to broadband. "U.S. Marines," he said sharply. "Identify yourself!"

There was no response. Vansen was back on squadwide. "The 32nd's standing by," she told them tersely.

"Unknown ship!" Cooper snapped. "Identify yourself or we will open fire!" But as he drew closer and the scan cleared, he began to think it probably wasn't a chig after all. All the chig ships Intelligence had listed were a smooth, matte black, with a two- or three-way symmetry; this one looked to have been cobbled together out of the remnants of four or five others, and its color was more dirty brown and grey than black. Cooper fired a brief burst across its flight path, and abruptly there was a squeal of static and a strange voice yelling in his ears.

"Whoa, stop! This is the independent freighter _Fatal Charm,_ Liberian registry! Jeez, lemme pull my pants up, will you?"

Cooper relaxed, and let go of the fire control. "I don't think it's a chig," he told the squad, then clicked back to the other's frequency and said, " _Fatal Charm,_ transmit your registry code and stand by."

West's breath whistled over the radio. "False alarm."

"Guess so." The registry checked out valid, and Vansen came onto the line.

" _Fatal Charm,_ are you aware that you are on the edge of an active war zone? I strongly advise you to withdraw eighty parsecs into Sol Sector!"

"Chigs haven't come this far in since the Belt," answered the other off-handedly. "Besides, this is the quickest course to Westover, and my cargo's perishable."

Vansen switched over to squadwide for privacy. "It's his ass he's risking," she said sourly. "But we're not leaving him out here to buzz the _Saratoga_ and probably get shot down by the 133rd. King of Hearts, escort this jerk to five hundred MSKs and warn him that if he's going to take short cuts he should keep his pants on. Jack of Spades, you and I will spread out and cover our sectors plus his 'til he's back in position." He could hear exasperation in her voice, but a smile too. "We know you can spot 'em at long range, Jack. Good eye."

Cooper smiled back at her, pleased with himself. He had spotted it, hadn't he? Good as an Angel.

They all ended up in the bar again that night, an eclectic collection of drinks on the table in front of them that Wang and Vansen, at least, were making good headway through. They were joking about the day, but they all knew, too, that it could have been very different.

Wang had two fingers of scotch in front of him, and he finished it in two swallows. Cooper grimaced, remembering the one McQueen had bought him; Wang saw the look and gestured at his beer.

"Why don't you ever get anything harder, Hawkes? Can't get a good buzz on three-percent." Cooper shrugged, and Wang cocked an eyebrow at him. "You know, if you're saving it up, you shouldn't bother. The cards expire anyway."

"I know." Their drink cards limited them to a certain amount of alcohol in a week; they could save their ration up for a few days, but it was reset every Sunday. "I don't like it. I like beer."

"Well, then, buddy, you can buy me a drink, because I may zero mine out tonight."

Vansen elbowed him. "You even think about getting in a plane with a hangover, and I'll turn you in to Colonel McQueen so fast your head will spin. Which it would be doing already," she added thoughtfully.

"Well, Miss Priss! I don't see you drinking lemonade."

Vansen smiled happily. "I have never had a hangover in my life."

"God," Damphousse said with exaggerated admiration, "you really do belong in the Marines."

Wang was staring into his glass, his arms crossed on the table and his shoulders hunched. "I thought--after the fight in the Belt, I thought that was it, you know? I've done it, now I won't be scared any more." He looked up at them, quickly. "'Cause I was, you know? In the Belt. But today, when Hawkes called the bogey, and for a moment we all thought--well." He picked the glass up and tilted it, sucking the last drops off the rim. "I just thought it would get easier."

"I suppose it does," Vansen said quietly.

"Besides, you were the one asking if we should move in," Damphousse pointed out. "Doesn't sound too scared to me." Wang shrugged.

West had his elbows propped on the table, leaning forward over his drink. "I thought I'd be scared. But--after we found that one on Mars...." He clenched a fist. "I just wanted to kill them. For what they did to the Tellus colony--I almost hoped it was a chig, today. For what they did to Kylen."

Damphousse touched his arm. "We know you loved her."

He looked at her, and then around at them all. "You know, that's the only reason I enlisted. I never told you that, did I? Because the--" he hesitated-- "they threw me off the colony ship, and the frontier guard was the only other way I could get to Tellus. You all wanted to be Marines. I figured I'd go AWOL, or angle for a dishonorable discharge, or something; I didn't care what, just so long as they dumped me in the Fornax Sector." His breath caught, and he shook his head angrily. "Well, here I am."

Cooper didn't like West. He had never liked him, and he knew what West had been about to say, too. But he remembered the sick dread that had crawled through him as he'd waited, all night and into the next morning, for Suzanne to come back from the infirmary. And the natural-born had backed him up today, been there covering Cooper's ass when he went to challenge. So he didn't say anything.

"Sometimes," West went on, slowly, "I wonder if she could still be alive. Some of the colonists were never accounted for.... She could have survived." Nobody said anything; but Cooper pressed his lips together in irritation. When people were dead, they were dead. He knew. He looked away, and saw Colonel McQueen coming through the swinging doors of the bar's entrance.

"Hey," he said. "The Colonel." The others looked around, and McQueen saw them and lifted a hand briefly as he went to the bar. Cooper took a swallow of beer and remembered the one the Colonel had bought him, ten days or so before. When McQueen turned around again from the bar, glass of scotch in his hand, Cooper waved at him, inviting him over.

McQueen pulled up a chair and sat down. He smiled briefly, privately, at Cooper, and Cooper smiled back, happy to be able to sit with him and talk, listen to him, even if they weren't alone this time. McQueen sipped his drink, nodding at them. "Big day?" he asked, dryly.

"That idiot," Vansen snorted. "He's lucky he didn't get blown apart."

"He may still. But not by us." McQueen looked around the table. "Yes, it was a false alarm, and he was an idiot. But you handled it well."

Damphousse glanced at Wang, then turned to McQueen. "Sir, you've got a lot of combat experience...." She trailed off, and he nodded.

"I fought in the AI War."

Vansen looked over at that, quickly, and then stared down into her glass. Damphousse straightened a little. "Does it--get easier, sir?"

Cooper heard Wang inhale, like a batchmate trying to warn her, but he wasn't looking at anyone but McQueen. McQueen gave her a steady gaze. "Easier? Easy has nothing to do with it, Lieutenant. You do it, that's all. And you do it as well as you can." His voice was level and crisp. "You can all do it well, or you wouldn't be here. And tomorrow, or next week, or next month, you will be in combat again. And you'll do your best." He glanced around the table again at all of them, and Cooper thought he looked at him longest. "Your best can be damned good."

Cooper leaned back into his chair, feeling a comfortable loosening in his chest. He wondered if McQueen had been scared, the first time he was in combat, but he didn't want to ask in front of the natural-borns, so he said, "Have you been out this far before, sir?"

"No. The AI War was mostly fought in Sol Sector; the big push into space was just beginning, fifteen years ago." He didn't mention Omicron Draconis, Cooper noticed. He figured McQueen didn't want the natural-borns knowing about that. But he'd told Cooper.

"The stars look different," Damphousse said, and the Colonel nodded agreement. They talked for a little while about constellations; Cooper had never thought to look for pictures in the stars, but tomorrow he would. Finishing his beer, he went to get another, and when he came back McQueen was asking, "Any of you Wild Cards play poker?" And they spent an hour or so playing five-card stud, all six of them, and Cooper didn't even care that he was losing.

He looked for constellations the next day, the screens blank as they had ever been and the radio quiet, but he didn't see anything more than he had always seen: the random flecks of light against the black. They were thicker in some places, though, and a faint swirl of dusty glow curved away to one side. He thought wind might look like that, if you could see it, somehow motionless in the night. But princesses and bears, no way. Still, looking held his attention, kept him from drifting off.

He went to work out that evening; he hadn't gone in a couple of days, and he missed the exercise. Changing into sweatpants and a t-shirt in the locker room, he stretched briefly on the edge of the track, and then broke into an easy jog. But as he came around for his third lap he glanced through the window into the weight room, and saw Colonel McQueen. He sped up, finishing the lap quickly, and went in too.

McQueen was doing pull-ups. Cooper got a couple of dumbbells off the rack and started on curls, but he watched McQueen as he did. The other in-vitro was in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, grey cotton stained dark with sweat at the armpits and the middle of his chest. He finished five, and hung for a moment before dropping off and shaking out his arms. Then he went into the locker room, and Cooper lost sight of him. But he couldn't chase the Colonel all around the gym; that sounded like what McQueen would probably call a stupid stunt, even if Cooper wasn't a recruit any more. He sighed and looked down at his biceps, bunching and working, and concentrated on his form.

Ten minutes later, though, they almost bumped into each other at the bench; Cooper had been looking at the clock on the wall, and hadn't realized McQueen was in front of him. "Sorry," he said, and then added, on a sudden urge, "Want a spotter, sir?"

McQueen nodded, but flexed his left arm carefully and waved Cooper down. "Trade off; you first." The barbell had two hundred twenty on it, which was a good weight for Cooper, so he lay down and settled his grip. McQueen's hands were between his, his thighs almost touching Cooper's head, as he counted "Three, two, one, _lift,_ " and guided the bar out of the rack and over Cooper's chest. Cooper let it down and pressed up again, concentrating--focussing--on the effort, and aware all the time of McQueen standing over him, watching him. His chest muscles were burning a little by the time he finished the second set, but it was a good feeling, a strong fire. He sat up and pulled his elbows back, stretching his pecs, then got up from the bench.

"You want to change the weight, sir?"

"Another twenty pounds," McQueen told him, and they added a couple of tens before Cooper took the spotter's position, and McQueen took his place on the bench. The mottled shirt stuck to him a little as he raised his arms, reaching for the bar, and Cooper could smell the tang of his sweat. McQueen took a deep breath, then nodded, and Cooper counted and pulled the weight up, letting McQueen take it from him and watching the compact strength of McQueen's body as he worked. After ten reps Cooper helped him ease the bar back into the rack, and waited while McQueen caught his breath. The veins were standing out in his arms, and his chest was heaving a little, but he forced his breathing steady and glanced up at Cooper. "Ready," he said, and Cooper gave it to him again.

But it was more difficult, this time; he was slower and less smooth, and Cooper could see the new sweat beading on his face. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he fought, each time, to raise the bar. On the seventh rep he nearly stalled halfway, straining; Cooper reached to take some of the weight off, to help him up, but McQueen gritted out "Leave it!" and he withdrew, keeping his hands a bare inch away as McQueen struggled, painfully, to full extension. He held the bar there a moment, gasping a quick breath in and out, then lowered it slowly; Cooper stayed close, tensely vigilant, as he began to force it upward again. But his left arm was visibly trembling, and at half extension his elbow buckled and gave out; the bar began to topple. Cooper caught it before it fell more than a couple of inches, and pulled it forcefully up and back. McQueen's hands followed, but they were limp on the bar, letting Cooper take all its weight.

Cooper got it settled in the rack and leaned on it, glaring down at him. McQueen's eyes were shut; he let go and brought his left arm to his chest, cradling it briefly in his right. "The pectoral was bruised," he said quietly. "I could hardly use the arm for the first couple of days."

Cooper's heart was punching at his sternum. "You shouldn't lift that much, then!" he burst out, louder than he'd meant to. "What if I hadn't been here?" McQueen's right arm hadn't collapsed, he probably could have tossed the bar if he'd had to; but nonetheless Cooper had a vivid, horrific image of what two hundred and forty pounds could have done, crashing onto McQueen's unprotected throat.

McQueen opened his eyes and swung his legs over, sitting up on the bench; he looked up at Cooper and grimaced a little, ruefully. "If you hadn't been here, I wouldn't have done it, would I? It just needs to be worked." He rotated his shoulder carefully in the joint, and rubbed at his chest with his right hand. "I'm going to the sauna; the heat helps the soreness. Thanks for the spot, Hawkes." He got up and walked away, and Cooper watched him go, breathing quickly without knowing if what he felt was fear or anger. Or admiration. Or something else.

He met him again in the locker room; McQueen came out of the sauna as Cooper was dressing after his shower. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, but Cooper could see the scars on the left side of his chest, faded like the ones on his face but still visible as irregular furrows of shiny skin through the chest hair. He was favoring his arm, too; not obviously, but Cooper could tell, watching him.

McQueen saw him looking. "It's not that bad," he said. "Burns and contusions, when my cockpit blew, and a deep bruise from the impact." He tilted his head to one side. "The ear is the only real problem. Vestibular nerve damage. They gave me an MEF implant, but it can't take high g-force; that's what grounded me."

"I saw you, when they brought you in," Cooper told him. "After the battle. You looked--" Dead. He had looked dead.

"I was unconscious. From what I remember before I passed out, I was probably covered in blood." Cooper nodded jerkily, remembering. "This is war, Hawkes. People die. You just have to do the best you can."

McQueen was rummaging in his bag for soap and shampoo, the scarred skin flushed and sweaty from the sauna. Cooper had a scar too, on his right forearm where he'd tried to block Greg's first slash at him, but the cut had healed to a thin line, almost invisible except in summer when it didn't tan. And one of his toes was numb, where it had frozen the first winter. He wondered what McQueen's scars would feel like to touch, remembering his dream, and the image he'd had of McQueen while he sexed himself.

He'd never really thought about sexing with anybody except his batchmates. It hadn't been safe in Philadelphia, for one thing; there was no way he could have kept somebody from seeing his stomach. But even with the few humans who'd known what he was and had still been friendly, it hadn't occurred to him. When he rubbed his own cock, when he panted and moaned at the finish, if he thought about anyone it was usually Suzanne, or Ephraim. He didn't want to share that with some natural-born.

Although there'd been that time on the shuttle to Mars, when he'd thought Vansen might do it with him, and he'd tried to kiss her, and she'd hit him.

But he didn't want to sex with Vansen. Thinking about it now, he knew he hadn't even really wanted to then. He'd just been so desperately lonely, remembering Suzanne, and knowing he was about to cut and run and he'd never see McQueen again, or any of them. Vansen had said something about losing people, and he'd wanted to touch her because he hadn't touched anybody in so long, and nobody had touched him. But he remembered Suzanne's face, smiling down at him as he gasped and arched to the finish in her hands. Intimate. Vansen had never looked at him that way, and--he liked her all right, but he didn't want her to. It wasn't her he was lonely for.

In his dream, McQueen had just lain on him, calm and comforting, watching him. Suzanne had never looked at him like that, or Ephraim; Ephraim's comfort, that last day and night, had been mixed with both their helpless terror. Cooper couldn't imagine McQueen helpless, not even in front of a monitor. And McQueen had never touched him like Cooper'd imagined him doing the other night--but maybe he would.

The rest of the 58th was in the rec room; he went up and found them watching some incomprehensible comedy on the TV. Meisner was there too, with his arm slung tight around Vansen. Cooper watched them touching. Vansen was laughing up into his face, looking happy, leaning against him. He couldn't imagine McQueen laughing at him with those wide eyes or tossing his head like that, either, but he'd like to feel McQueen's arm across his shoulders. He wondered what McQueen's face would look like, if Cooper sexed him; if McQueen's eyes would hold his as McQueen finished in his hand.

By twenty-one thirty he figured the Colonel had to have finished in the gym, would probably be back in his stateroom, and he got up, abandoning his soda and not bothering to acknowledge Damphousse's curious look as he pushed past her. They were his friends, but McQueen--maybe McQueen could be a better one.

He stood outside the Colonel's stateroom, and hesitated with his hand raised. He'd only been here once before, to find out if they were kin. They weren't. And they weren't batchmates, either...but maybe it would be okay anyway. He hoped so.

And if not--well, it was like finding out about kin. If McQueen said no, he'd only be back where he was now; it wouldn't hurt to ask. And he wanted to be touched. To touch McQueen. Special.

He slapped the metal, and after a moment heard the Colonel's voice, muffled and hardly audible. "Who's at my hatch?"

"It's me, sir," he called back. "Lieutenant Hawkes."

The hatch swung open and McQueen, barefoot in a t-shirt and uniform trousers, was looking at him inquiringly. "Something I can do for you, Hawkes?"

"Uh--yes, sir." He didn't want to ask in the passageway. "Can I come in?"

McQueen stood aside and let him in, closing the hatch after him. Cooper looked around the room, at all the pictures on the wall. Most of them were of people, but they weren't wearing Marine uniforms; he wondered how McQueen knew them. There was a scatter of papers on the desk under the viewport, the chair pushed back where McQueen had gotten up to let him in; against the right wall the bed was crisply made. There was a sink in the corner, with a small mirror over it, reflecting them.

"Yes?" asked McQueen.

Cooper tightened his fingers, had a sudden memory of Baxter, and forced himself to relax. It was a simple enough thing to ask, wasn't it?

"Sir, I wanted-- I was wondering if you'd like to sex. With me," he added, and then felt stupid. That part was obvious enough.

McQueen was staring at him with wary astonishment. "What did you say, Lieutenant?"

Nervously, Cooper repeated himself.

McQueen stared at him a moment longer, then said, slowly, "You want to have sex with me."

The phrasing was a little strange, but Cooper nodded. "Yeah." McQueen's expression was shifting from astonishment to something harder, and he hastily added, "I know we're not batchmates, sir. But--I figure I'll never see my batchmates again, you know? And I thought maybe you wouldn't mind."

Now McQueen was looking at him like he'd never seen him before. "You had sex with your batchmates?"

"Well, sure," Cooper answered, confused. "Didn't you?"

McQueen turned away then, abruptly, and for a moment Cooper was afraid he'd screwed up somehow, but McQueen only went to the viewport and looked out. Cooper kept still, uncertain what he should be doing; McQueen's face was in profile to him, and he couldn't read his expression.

"No," said McQueen, tonelessly, "I didn't. It was forbidden."

"Forbidden?" Cooper echoed, and McQueen nodded.

"By the monitors."

"The monitors told us it was okay," Cooper protested, and at that McQueen laughed a little, but not as if he thought it was funny. "Eighteen years, Hawkes," he said. "Policies change."

"So will you?" Cooper moved a little closer, and McQueen turned around; his eyes pinned Cooper where he stood. But not angry; he didn't look angry. Something else.

"Why do you want to have sex with me?"

Why? "Because--because I like you," Cooper said, honestly. "Because it feels good. I want to make you feel good. I was going to ask if you wanted a massage, too," he added. "It might help your arm. Only I wanted this more."

McQueen slashed the air with one hand. "You're young, good-looking. You're even something of a war hero. There are probably dozens of people on this ship who'd sleep with you."

"Does that mean you won't, sir?" He hadn't thought of sleeping with McQueen, only sexing, but he wasn't going to get distracted by details. "I don't want to sex with anybody else. Besides, they're all natural-borns."

"So I'm the only other wetbrain on the ship, is that it?" McQueen did sound angry now, and Cooper shook his head, hard, and took another step forward.

"That's not what I mean! I just don't want to do it with them. I said, I like you! More than them." He reached out, but McQueen's eyes cut to his hand with a force like the Colonel's chop at his wrist, when he'd tried to hit Perlick in the gym, and he hurriedly pulled it back.

"You can get your rocks off somewhere else, Lieutenant," McQueen snapped coldly.

"What?" Cooper didn't understand the expression, but after a moment he realized what the Colonel must have meant. "Well, yeah, I know. I mean, I do myself. But it's different with someone, you know? It's--" He'd never had a word for it, in the facility, but the squad's conversation the other night had given him some. "It's intimate. Special. I don't want to do it with anybody else. I just...." He scowled at himself and gestured helplessly, frustrated. The Colonel was angry with him, and if he couldn't make it right, then it would be worse than if he'd never asked.

"I was thinking about--about the time we talked on the drill field, the first time, back on Earth. And in the bar here, when you told me about the mountain. And--the first night we were on board, I dreamed about my batchmates, only you were there too. I just hoped, maybe you'd want to sex with me. I didn't mean to make you mad."

He glanced up, worriedly. McQueen was very pale, but he didn't look angry any more. He was eyeing Cooper with a strange, wary consideration.

"You're not talking about sex, Hawkes," he said.

"Huh? Yes, I am."

"Not just sex. You're talking about a--relationship. An intimate relationship."

Cooper nodded emphatically. "Yeah. Like I said. So will you?" He reached out again, tentatively, relieved when McQueen let him touch his shoulder. McQueen's breathing was shallow and fast, and he was tensely still under Cooper's hand. But Cooper, watching his face, saw a wanting begin, flickering and rising from deep in his eyes. Encouraged, he slid his grip down McQueen's arm, but when he reached the wrist and circled it with hopeful fingers McQueen took a step back, pulling himself free.

"Don't, Hawkes," he said. But his voice was tight, and it didn't sound like he meant it.

"Don't you want to? With me?" Cooper thought he did; McQueen's gaze fixed on him held a hungry desire, now, building toward Cooper's own. Except that McQueen still looked uneasy, too, and Cooper was just hopeful, and confused.

McQueen shut his eyes, then, and took a long, shuddering breath. Cooper watched, not understanding, but he exhaled with McQueen, trying to help. Maybe it did; when the Colonel opened his eyes again, he looked a little calmer.

"Yes," he said. He seemed almost surprised at himself, as he said it. "I--yes."

"Really?" Cooper'd begun to worry; now he grinned with elated relief. "You do?"

McQueen's mouth twitched in a faint, rueful smile. "Yes. For--a while, now."

"Why didn't you say?" He wanted to touch McQueen again, but McQueen caught his hand and held it away, in the space between them.

"It's not a good idea," he said tersely.

Cooper liked the feel of McQueen's fingers, bony and strong around his own, and he didn't see why they shouldn't do it if they both wanted to. "Because we're not batchmates?"

McQueen frowned at him. "I'm your commanding officer, Hawkes!"

"What's that got to do with it?" Cooper asked blankly.

McQueen scowled, and let go his grip on Cooper's hand. "I could get in trouble," he said. "Hell, I could be brought up on charges."

"For sexing?" That didn't make any sense. Vansen had done it with Meisner, and Meisner was a Navy full lieutenant, so he outranked her, too. And everybody in the 58th sexed themselves, as far as he could tell.

"For coercing you, damn it!"

And that was just ridiculous. "I'm asking _you!_ " Cooper retorted, exasperated.

McQueen stared at him, and then laughed again, more easily than before. "So you are."

"So what's the problem? If you want to?" He lifted his hand again, and this time McQueen didn't stop him. Cooper laid his palm flat on McQueen's chest, feeling his heart beating rapidfire against the ribs. Slowly McQueen's hands lifted, rested on his upper arms, and McQueen was holding him. Cooper reached out with both hands, then, pulling them together, and McQueen's arms wrapped hard around his back. McQueen was breathing hard, pressed to him chest to chest. Cooper hugged him tightly; he felt as though he could stay that way forever, with their bodies locked against each other. But McQueen was drawing back again, and reluctantly he let go.

McQueen still looked a little wary, but there was a tentative, startled pleasure in his eyes. He raised a hand to Cooper's cheek, and warmth surged through Cooper at the touch. Then McQueen leaned forward and pressed his mouth against Cooper's, soft and warm. The batch hadn't kissed, but they'd seen it in the film, and he'd seen natural-borns doing it since; he was a little surprised, but he pressed back, and when McQueen's mouth opened and his tongue slid between Cooper's lips, he met it with his own. It was a strange feeling, slick wetness of their saliva mixing, and the limber muscle of McQueen's tongue in his mouth. He liked it, though. A lot. He opened his mouth wider, leaning into the kiss, and their teeth clicked together; he licked McQueen's teeth, smooth and even, and then his tongue. He wanted to pull McQueen to him again; his cock was swelling, and he wanted to press them hard together. And naked, not with clothes in the way. He slid his hands under the hem of McQueen's t-shirt, pulling it out of his trousers and spreading his fingers wide over warm skin.

McQueen murmured into his mouth and eased them apart. His eyes slid sidelong past Cooper to the bed, and Cooper nodded, smiling, and went to sit down on it and take off his shoes and socks. As he looked up again McQueen was pulling the t-shirt off over his head, and this time Cooper could touch him, like he'd wanted to in the locker room; he reached out and stroked his fingers over the scars, jagged streaks seared across the other's flesh. Then he stood up again and stripped off the flightsuit. His cock was big and twisted in his underwear, and he shifted it, soothing the welcome ache.

McQueen was unbuckling his belt, but he stopped, watching Cooper's hands guardedly. Cooper hesitated, uncertain. Had he done something wrong?

"What?" he asked, a little nervously.

McQueen looked up again. There was a tightly leashed eagerness in his eyes, but more wariness again, as well. He'd said he wanted to do it, but he wasn't moving, and Cooper waited apprehensively.

"I'm a virgin, Hawkes," McQueen said.

"A what?"

"I've never had sex." His voice was flat.

Cooper relaxed and smiled at him. "I can show you. It's easy." He reached out and finished undoing the trousers, slid pants and underwear together down McQueen's legs and helped him step out of them before pulling off his own undershirt and briefs. They were both naked, now, and he tugged McQueen toward the bed. He'd sex him first, let him feel how good it could be.

McQueen let Cooper settle him on his back, and Cooper sat beside him to trace through the sparse hair on his chest. The tension around his eyes slackened, fractionally, as Cooper stroked him, and his nipples tightened under exploring fingers. Cooper rubbed them again, watching him.

"How come you've never sexed--had sex?" he asked suddenly.

McQueen put a hand over his, stilling him, and grimaced a little. "It was forbidden, in the facility. Something tanks shouldn't do. None of us--would have dared disobey."

Cooper nodded, remembering fear. Under their joined hands he felt McQueen take a slow breath. "I still tried not to think about it much, after we got out of the mine and I enlisted. I must have been ten or twelve years old before I was really sure that it was okay. That I wouldn't be monitored, somehow, if I tried. And by then...." McQueen closed his eyes briefly, opened them again. "I had a field commission, in the AI War. It's not easy being a mustang; too many OCS graduates hoping to see you foul up. It's worse being a mustang tank. Half of the natural-borns looked at me like the dancing bear." Cooper made a sound of incomprehension, and McQueen shrugged. "No one notices how well the bear dances; they're only surprised it can dance at all. The other half were just waiting for something they could use to bust me right down to private again. A relationship like that--like this--always seemed too risky. So I convinced myself I didn't need it. Didn't want it."

For all that time. Cooper exhaled gently, and moved his hand again, fingering McQueen's nipple. "But you want it now. With me."

McQueen sighed at the touch. "Yes," he said, hoarsely.

Cooper smiled, feeling proud. He rubbed both his palms gently against McQueen's skin, learning its texture, and liking the way McQueen shifted, arching a little under his hands. McQueen had more chest hair than Cooper did, and the scars were ridged and strange, but his belly felt like Cooper's own, smooth and unblemished. His cock was swelling, lifting up toward Cooper's hands, and he shivered when Cooper wrapped his fingers around it, stroking slowly. His foreskin was pulling back to show silver drops squeezing one after another from the tip. Cooper rubbed the wetness between his fingers and paused, remembering.

"You said--a relationship. Have you sexed yourself?"

McQueen's eyes blinked open; he looked surprised. "Of course I have," he said shortly. Fascinated, Cooper saw a tinge of pink appear around his cheekbones.

"Good. The first time--it scared the hell out of me and Suzanne." He showed the Colonel the semen on his fingers, trailing in shimmering strings to the tip of McQueen's cock, and McQueen's face creased in a smile, understanding immediately.

Cooper started rubbing, then; he slid one hand under McQueen's balls and fingered them gently, but when McQueen's hips jerked he put both hands on his cock, using the semen he was dripping to ease the friction. Sometimes Ephraim had teased him like this, drawing it out, but Cooper only wanted to make it good for McQueen, wanted to see him finish hard and strong. McQueen's eyes were shut, his teeth gritted; Cooper knew it would be soon, and he was startled when McQueen caught his wrists, dragging his hands away to pull him down. They were pressed together now and McQueen was kissing him again, tongue and hips thrusting at him; he could feel McQueen's erection slipping against his stomach, his own scraping through the other's pubic hair. It felt good; it reminded him of his dream again, and he twisted and rolled them over, so that McQueen was on top of him, the way he had dreamed. Only he hadn't dreamed the cock hard against him, and the other tongue in his mouth. It was a strange kind of sexing, rubbing with their whole bodies against each other, but it filled the ache in his chest, the lonely yearning of his skin, and he wrapped his arms around McQueen's back and clung to him.

McQueen was shuddering, moving hard against him, and Cooper could tell he was close to finishing even without being properly rubbed. He wished he could see his face, but it was almost as good to be so tightly pressed against him, so that Cooper felt every rippling lurch of the other's body in his own. McQueen was panting harshly, fingers clawing at Cooper's shoulders; then his voice caught in a long, tearing growl and he threw his head back, tendons standing out hard in his throat. Cooper saw the strain shatter across his face as the pleasure hit, and he clutched at him, grabbing McQueen's buttocks to grind his semen between them, hot against his own belly. McQueen rammed down again, once more, and then hung over him, propped on his elbows and panting for breath.

Cooper relaxed with him. He stroked both hands along McQueen's spine, feeling the sweat there, the working lungs. McQueen's eyes found him again, dazed; Cooper smiled, and McQueen smiled back, a little hesitantly.

"See?" Cooper told him. "It's easy. And it's good." He rubbed gently at the tense muscles of McQueen's lower back. "I like touching you."

McQueen nodded. He rolled to one side, freeing a hand to reach for Cooper's cock; Cooper caught his breath when the warm fingers closed around it, and pushed up into the grip. "Oh--yeah." He wanted McQueen to touch him too, rub him hard and hold his cock while he finished. Or maybe lie on him again, so that Cooper could feel the whole length of their bodies, and McQueen's arms tight around him, holding him like he had held McQueen. But the Colonel didn't do either of those; he slid down along Cooper's body, almost to the foot of the bed, and instead of rubbing Cooper's cock he put it in his mouth.

Cooper gasped in surprise and struggled up on an elbow to see; he'd never felt anything like the wet enveloping heat, the tongue licking at him. He fell back on the bed again, savoring the feeling, his eyes squeezed shut; rolling his hips, he thrust up and felt McQueen take him deep. Something tightly wonderful clamped around the tip of his penis, but then the air was abruptly cold against the wet skin, and McQueen was coughing thickly.

He opened his eyes, panting, and peered down the length of his body. "Are you okay?"

McQueen glanced up briefly, eyes shadowed. "I guess it takes practice."

"Did I choke you?" Cooper managed. "I'm sorry...." He should have been more careful, but no one had ever sucked at his cock, he hadn't realized the danger of shoving in like that...and then McQueen put both hands on it, rubbing, and he closed his eyes again and groaned. It was so good. McQueen's hands tightened, quick and strong and one cupping his balls, now, as the other slicked saliva along his length. He pushed up hard into the grip, feeling his cock swollen and straining, the urgency building higher, and then it burst wonderfully through his crotch and he let go, groaning, feeling the spurts leave him, and McQueen's hands on him, squeezing them out. And with the last pulses McQueen bent over and took the end of his cock in his mouth again, sucking the semen out of him, so that he cried out and trembled with surprise and pleasure, feeling him swallowing.

As soon as he'd caught his breath he tugged at McQueen's shoulders, dragging him up to lie on him again; their cocks touched, McQueen's soft, his softening, and the prickle of pubic hair against his hypersensitivity made him shiver. McQueen was just lying on him, his face in the curve of Cooper's neck. Under his warmth and weight Cooper rested, drowsily content.

Eventually, though, curiosity wormed its way through his mind. "I didn't know you could do that," he said. "With your mouth."

McQueen made a small, surprised sound, like a grunt. "I thought you'd done this before."

"Not like that," Cooper told him wonderingly. "If you've never--how did you know about that?"

After a moment, McQueen said, a little stiffly, "I read about it."

"In a book?" Cooper twisted under his weight to squint at the bookshelf against the opposite wall. He hadn't bothered to read much since he'd left the facility, but he'd never known there were books on sexing.

"Not those."

Cooper quit trying to see the books, and trailed a finger along the warm line of McQueen's spine. "What does it taste like?" he asked curiously. "Semen?"

McQueen twitched a little, in surprise again, or because he didn't like the touch. A few of Cooper's batchmates had been ticklish; he stilled his hand apologetically. "You've never tasted your own?" McQueen asked him, and he shrugged, a little embarrassed.

"When we were really young, a lot of the batch kept putting things in their mouths. The monitors made us stop. They said only food, and toothbrushes and stuff; nothing that wasn't specifically meant to be tasted. They were--pretty strict about it. You know." He'd spent a terrifying night in isolation once, for repeatedly chewing the clothes he'd been wearing, and the corner of the sheet; he'd been trying to figure out the different textures. He'd never done it again. "What's it like?"

"Bitter," McQueen said, after another pause. "It changes."

"Is that what mine was like?" McQueen didn't answer, but Cooper was already wondering about McQueen's. "Can I lick your cock next time?" he asked, and wriggled in anticipation. "I knew it would be good, with you. When can we do it again?"

McQueen was still for a moment. Then he rolled all the way off Cooper, lying on his back so that Cooper was squeezed uncomfortably between him and the wall. And he was looking away, up toward the ceiling with his arms folded across his stomach. He didn't answer.

Cooper twisted onto his side to look at him, the tingling anticipation in his blood abruptly souring. He'd done something wrong again, he realized uneasily, but he didn't know what. Maybe he shouldn't have asked? He could see McQueen's face now, for the first time since the Colonel had started really rubbing him, and he looked somber and preoccupied.

"Didn't you like it? Sexing?" Cooper asked hesitantly.

McQueen nodded at that, a short motion. "Yes."

"You sure acted like you did," Cooper agreed, offering a small grin; but McQueen's face only went a little more tense, and his gaze didn't shift. Cooper's skin itched with worry.

"Was it--like the books said?"

"No."

Oh. Maybe he was disappointed. "I can do it better next time," Cooper promised hastily; he wasn't sure how, but he'd think of something. "I won't choke you again, or anything."

McQueen got up and went to the sink, wetting a washcloth and wiping at his stomach with it. Cooper sat up, watching him nervously. "Sir? Did I do something wrong?"

McQueen rinsed the cloth out and came back to the bed to hand it to Cooper. "This may have been a mistake," he said flatly, and reached for his clothes.

"What? Why?"

"You should be going," McQueen told him. "It's late; the squad will be wondering where you are."

"Would you get in trouble?" Cooper asked. Maybe that was what he was worried about. "Should I not tell them?"

"I'd rather not," McQueen said sharply. "But no, nobody else is likely to bring charges if you don't. Unless--" he stopped, fixing Cooper with a sudden, sharp look. Cooper froze with one leg through his underwear, apprehensively, but the Colonel only went on, "I'm still your commanding officer, Hawkes. This doesn't-- I'm not going to take it easier on you, because of this. Don't expect some kind of special treatment."

Cooper pulled his shorts up and stared at him, bewildered. "I know that! That hasn't got anything to do with it." Besides, he liked McQueen's brusque assurance, his snapped-out commands in drill. McQueen had called him a stupid tank, once, and saved his life.

"I don't want to tell the squad," he added, and saw McQueen's face relax minutely. "It's not any of their business. Just ours."

McQueen nodded. "No." They finished dressing, and McQueen was waiting to let him out. Cooper didn't want to go, wanted to touch him again, but he was afraid McQueen didn't want him to. He didn't want to do anything to make him angry again; if the Colonel wanted him to leave, maybe he'd better do it. Unhappily he followed McQueen to the hatch.

"Goodnight, sir."

McQueen swung the heavy door open. "Goodnight, Lieutenant." Cooper ducked through, and heard it latch shut behind him with ominous, echoing finality.

Wang and Vansen were in their racks already when he came into the wardroom, but they were awake, talking; Damphousse was reading at the table, and West was taking a late shower. He didn't want to talk to anyone, although Damphousse looked up from her book when he came in; he avoided her eyes and undressed quickly, bundling his clothes away and sliding between the sheets.

He could still feel, faintly, McQueen's mouth around his cock. And some of the semen was still on his stomach, a small patch of scaly dryness and some clumps in his pubic hair; he put a hand down, even though the light was on, and fingered them, turning on his side to hide the movement from the others.

McQueen had said something about sleeping with him. If they did it again, maybe he could stay.

He wanted to do it again. He remembered the way McQueen's hands had gripped his shoulders, and he wanted to see his face while they sexed. He wanted to massage him, feel the bunching strength of muscle under his hands. He wanted McQueen to be watching him, so intently, while he finished.

But maybe McQueen didn't want to sex with him again. 

He wished he'd read more, so he'd know other ways to do it. He never had asked Vansen what she'd done with Meisner; she might help. But if he asked her, she might want to know why he was so curious, and he didn't want to tell her. McQueen didn't want him to, either.

Besides, McQueen'd said he liked the sexing. Maybe he just didn't want to do it with Cooper any more. The way Cooper liked Vansen and the others, but he didn't want to sex with them. He remembered how he'd felt sometimes when he finished in Ephraim's hands, or when Suzanne had clutched at him and moaned, and he'd watched her, glad to make her feel good. He'd been proud when McQueen said he wanted to sex with him, exhilarated that McQueen wanted that feeling with him. And he wanted it with McQueen too. He wanted to feel all McQueen's determination, that fierce assurance that none of his batchmates had ever had, focussed on him, in McQueen's eyes and hands on his body. And he didn't understand why McQueen had gone so tense and curt afterward, unless he'd decided that he didn't want anything special like that with Cooper after all.

He picked at the snarls in his pubic hair, desolately, wishing there was more left; when he put his finger in his mouth he could only make out a faint hint of sourness, under the taste of his own skin. He touched his lips, remembering McQueen's mouth on his, and turned over on his stomach, burying his face in the pillow to shut out the light and the low conversation of the others. McQueen had said he'd liked it--but he'd acted like he didn't want to do it again, and he'd made Cooper leave.

Cooper was slow to wake up the next morning, and stumbled through his shower, not thinking until afterward that it was washing away the last trace of their semen. Maybe his last chance to taste McQueen's, if the Colonel didn't ever want to sex with him, be with him like that, again. He pulled on his flightsuit morosely and headed for chow, slumping over a plate of eggs that he didn't eat. He couldn't stop thinking about McQueen, clutching him so tightly as he cried out in stunned pleasure and spurted semen between their bellies; and later, flat on his back with his arms wrapped across his chest like he didn't ever want to touch Cooper again. When Damphousse patted his arm he jumped a little; he hadn't even realized she was there, and it took him a second to focus on her face.

"Are you okay, Hawkes?" she asked.

He stared at her, not understanding. "I'm fine."

"You look--I don't know. Distracted."

"I'm fine," he said again, sharply. But he didn't really wake up until McQueen strode into the briefing room at 0748; something tightened suddenly and painfully in his stomach, and he pulled himself upright and waited to see how McQueen would look at him.

He didn't. The Colonel surveyed them all and began the same kind of quick status report they'd been getting for days: whatever the other patrols had reported overnight, the latest news on chig activity in nearby sectors. Cooper couldn't even tell if his arm was still sore, or not. When he gestured them out to the cockpits Cooper hung behind while the others crowded through the hatchway, anxiously hoping for--something, and didn't get it. McQueen didn't seem angry at him any more, or anything; he was sorting through files and reports like he didn't even notice that Cooper was there.

But he'd said he wouldn't treat Cooper any different. Maybe he'd say something when they came back. Cooper clutched that hope to his empty stomach all the way through the shift.

About half an hour before they were relieved, Vansen came on the radio to say that they were all to report back to the briefing room as soon as they landed. McQueen was already there, waiting, when they filed in, and he gave the squad a stern once-over, but his eyes never met Cooper's, no matter how hard Cooper tried to make them.

"You won't be flying patrol tomorrow; we've just received new orders. Commodore Glen van Ross has been posted to the _Saratoga,_ to direct naval operations along the line. He's currently on board the _Alexander,_ and an ISSCV will leave here tomorrow at 0900 to bring him aboard. You will escort that ship, as an honor guard--but I emphasize the word 'guard'! Chig patrols have been spotted in that area. I'll be on board the ISSCV, and I expect to see you flying straight! Report to the flight deck at 0845, ready to go. Clear?"

"Yes, sir!" they chorused, Cooper loudest of all, and he dismissed them and headed out. Cooper wanted to go after him, wanted desperately to ask the Colonel what was wrong. But McQueen was already gone by the time Cooper had gotten to his feet and pushed his way through the others, who were stretching their legs and talking about the new orders in a jumble between him and the hatchway. He got there in time to see McQueen's back disappearing around the turn of the corridor, and stared after him in frustrated worry. He was sure the Colonel wouldn't like it if Cooper bolted out chasing him in front of the whole squad, demanding to know what he'd done wrong the night before, and he didn't want to do anything that might make McQueen angrier at him. He was afraid to go talk to McQueen in his stateroom that night, too, even though he could have ditched the others. McQueen hadn't acted like he even wanted to look at him.

McQueen stopped by the flight deck the next morning, standing in the entry in his dress blues and scanning the flight deck with a quick, evaluating eye as the squad got ready to launch. Cooper was already in his cockpit; he shoved angrily at the ground crewman who was trying to fit his helmet on and leaned to the side, trying to catch McQueen's eye. McQueen was looking at the others, and glancing down to check his watch, and Cooper gritted his teeth in despair.

Then McQueen looked up again, right at him. And he looked a little tense, but not angry. Cooper's stomach twisted and he brought a hand up in a half-salute, wanting McQueen to know he'd seen him, and McQueen nodded briefly back. The pre-launch sirens were already going, warning the techs to clear the flight deck, and the crewman he'd been dodging jammed the helmet onto his shoulders and threw the seals; it cut off his peripheral vision, and he couldn't see McQueen leave.

But the Colonel had come to see him off. To see the whole squad, probably, but he'd nodded right at Cooper, too, like maybe he wasn't angry any more. Cooper barely noticed the lurch of takeoff, slamming him back with sudden acceleration, and Vansen had to call him twice before he remembered to acknowledge her flight orders. A three-hour trip each way, and they wouldn't land on the _Alexander,_ so it was as long a shift as the patrols, but this time McQueen was coming with them. They circled the _Saratoga_ until the ISSCV was launched, then fell into a wide formation surrounding it and lit their jets. McQueen did a radio check, and Cooper tried to fly the best formation he ever had, wondering if the Colonel were watching him.

The pickup was uneventful; they circled the _Alexander_ the same way they had the _Saratoga,_ although the battleship was much smaller than the carrier they had come from, while the ISSCV docked. The command deck of the _Alexander_ checked in with Vansen, but McQueen didn't come on the line; Cooper didn't pay much attention to the traded acknowledgements, and anyway the ISSCV cut free again after only ten minutes or so and they started back. But an hour into the return trip, Wang's voice broke sharply into the desultory conversation on the radio.

"Bogeys, one eight mark epsilon twenty! Two--no, three, closing fast!"

"Jack and King, to intercept!" Vansen snapped. Cooper was already juking hard up, swerving to cover Wang's left, as he acknowledged the order; West veered in from the other side, and Vansen and Damphousse were below them, flanking the ISSCV in close cover. Cooper's heart raced; he could see the other planes too, now, and in his ear West was saying, tightly, "That's no Liberian freighter." Chigs, three of them, coming in fast, and he shoved the throttle forward and opened fire, a streak of flame slicing through the darkness but missing as the enemy twisted away. One of them broke formation and swerved after Damphousse; the other two were headed straight for him and Wang.

"I'm on him, Phousse," Vansen was yelling, and Cooper spun his plane hard, g-force hauling at him as the stars wheeled, and tried to trap one of the others between him and Wang; but it veered and opened fire from tail guns, and he had to break off and dodge below the ecliptic. It reversed and chased him, and West and Wang were tangled with the other and couldn't pry it off his six. He looped and slewed his plane aside, jets howling, and saw a shot burn past his canopy and nearly hit Wang, beyond him.

But that gave him an idea. The feints McQueen had taught them--if he could do it--he fought the g to pull the plane up again, trying to stay out of the chig's lock-on and figure out where the others were, above him. There, the two Hammerheads and the third chig twisting around each other, exchanging rapid bursts of weapon fire. "Clear the deck!" he shouted into the radio. "Hammer and anvil!"

"Clear!" Wang shouted back, and West swerved aside, pulling the third chig after him in a trajectory just askew from Cooper and the one on his ass. Cooper accelerated hard and straight, holding his breath as the chig opened up a long burst, tracking in on him; and at the last moment he veered hard, so that the chig, following, nearly strafed the other one that West had decoyed into the line of fire. Both enemy ships swerved jerkily, and Wang swooped in and blew one of them apart, screaming as he fired. "Hoo-yah!"

"Yah!" Cooper yelled back, and turned after the other one. It had recovered and was ducking aside, dodging West's volley to streak away again. They peeled out after it, but it was drawing away when Vansen came on the line.

"Jack of Spades, King of Hearts, break off pursuit!"

"We could get him!" Cooper protested, and McQueen broke in.

"You don't have the speed, Jack, and it's too risky to disperse the squad. Pull back; there could be more coming." Cooper acknowledged the order crisply, with a burst of relief that McQueen was talking to him, and heeled his plane around in a perfect Immelman.

McQueen's maneuver, the one the Angry Angels had invented, had worked. He shivered now, thinking of how he'd put himself deliberately in the line of fire; but the chig had been too slow to pull out of the trap, just like McQueen had promised. "What do you think of those drills now, King of Hearts?" he asked, and grinned when West's voice answered, "Worth every minute."

"All right, can the chatter," McQueen ordered. "Report, AOD."

"Ace of Hearts got creased; her radio's out," Vansen said. "She indicates no serious damage. Two enemy destroyed, one escaped."

"Bring Ace of Hearts in; signal her to stay close. The rest of you, spread a wider net. That was a probe; either they won't be back, or they'll be back in force. We'll be in range of the _Saratoga_ in an hour, and we'll call for reinforcements then if we need them, but until then, look alive!"

Cooper swung his plane nearer Damphousse and blinked a query light at her; she flashed back _OK._ He could see the burn scar along the nose of her Hammerhead, where the shot had taken off the radio housing.

They stayed vigilant all the way back, but there were no more attacks; the 32nd was on patrol, and as the 58th passed inside their lines Cooper's stomach muscles loosened and he sighed with relief. It was good to be back. McQueen came on the radio again. "Park your planes and then report to the loading bay on the double."

As soon as they were out of their cockpits the squad crowded around Damphousse on the flight deck, while she laughed and insisted that she was all right, just shaken up; then they jogged down to where the ISSCV was docking. There was a Navy honor guard there already, and the 58th formed up on the other side of the airlock. The boatswain's pipe sounded, shrilly, and the lock slid open.

McQueen stepped down onto the deck and turned around, coming to attention as well. After him came a human man, darker, a little shorter: Commodore Ross.

The _Saratoga_ 's captain stepped forward and saluted; Ross returned it. "Welcome aboard, sir."

"Thank you, captain." Ross looked around, surveying the bay, and paused when he came to the 58th. Cooper saw McQueen draw himself up still straighter, and he tried to do the same, very aware of his rumpled flightsuit and disheveled hair, while opposite them the sailors stood crisp and polished in shining white. "Colonel McQueen. These are your people?"

"Yes, sir." His voice was stiffly expressionless.

Ross eyed them, then turned to McQueen. "I expected," he said levelly, "when I requested that you be assigned as my escort, that I would be getting the best the Marines had to offer. I'm glad to see I wasn't wrong."

"Thank you, sir." McQueen's face didn't change, but a light kindled, deep in his eyes. He followed Captain Jessup and the Commodore out of the bay, and the Navy guard fell in behind them, with the 58th last of all. Cooper blew out a long breath of relief, and smiled.

As they were stowing their gear, Wang called across the wardroom to Damphousse, grinning. "Hey, I knew you'd be okay, Phousse. Know why?" He unzipped his flightsuit and pulled it open, showing his chest. "I put my lucky shirt on this morning!"

"What?" She turned around, and Cooper looked too. It looked like a regular grey t-shirt, except that it said _Bears_ across it. "Oh, come on, Paul."

"No, really! I got this shirt the day I saw the Bears win the Superbowl, and then senior year I wore it to my German final. And let me tell you, there is no _way_ I should have passed that class. And I did! Lucky shirt."

Vansen slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, keep wearing it, then. Whatever works."

"It does work," Wang said, folding it carefully away. "I feel better with it on."

"Hey," put in West, "you heard the Commodore saying he'd requested us, specifically, as his escort?"

"Not us," Damphousse corrected him, "McQueen. Sounded to me like they know each other."

Cooper nodded. He'd thought so too, and wondered.

After dinner he left the others in the bar and went back to McQueen's stateroom. He knocked right away, this time, but there was no answer; McQueen wasn't there. Cooper stood, uncertainly, in the passageway. He wanted to see the Colonel, to talk to him and find out what was wrong. If he had changed his mind about sexing, being intimate. But he couldn't hang around waiting for him to get back. Someone would see him; he had no real business on this deck.

Maybe he was working out. Cooper grabbed shorts and sneakers from his locker and headed for the gym, but McQueen wasn't there either, and he jogged a couple of laps around the track before quitting and trailing back to the bar. Vansen and Wang were still there, and he slumped in a chair next to them and stared dejectedly into a beer, listening less to the human conversation than to the jukebox, loud and raucous.

He glanced up, though, when Vansen swore under her breath, and saw Meisner coming toward them. He looked friendly enough--he was grinning broadly, anyway, the way they did--and Cooper didn't understand why Vansen had stiffened. But he pushed his chair back, getting his legs free of the table, just in case. Across from him, Wang was looking edgy too.

"Shane!" Meisner said loudly, and put a hand on her shoulder; she slapped it off and glared at him. "Aw, come on, honey, don't be like that." His voice slid strangely around in pitch. "Gimme a kiss, huh?"

Vansen stared up at him coldly. "You're drunk, Meisner. Buzz off." Cooper tensed; drunk humans meant trouble. But Meisner only blinked at her through his glasses, and wandered off again, looking back a couple of times as he went. Vansen sucked in a breath through her teeth and put both her elbows on the table, looking angry.

"I thought you liked him," Cooper said, confused. "I mean, Damphousse said--" Wang kicked him under the table, and he broke off, startled.

"Yeah. I can imagine what Phousse said." Vansen scowled.

"Are you mad at her?" he asked, hesitantly; he wasn't sure who she was mad at, but it had to be someone.

"Damphousse? No. Meisner's a jerk." She tossed her head. "Some guys, you sleep with them once and they turn into assholes."

"Sleep with them?" Cooper echoed. Vansen had been asleep when he and the others had come into the wardroom that night, after Damphousse had beaten West at canasta, but Meisner hadn't been there.

Vansen was looking at him strangely; so was Wang. "Screw them. Have sex."

"Oh."

"He thinks he's got some kind of claim on me now. Fat chance." She pushed her chair back and got up. "I'm going for another drink. You guys want anything?" They shook their heads, and she headed for the bar. Cooper stared into his beer again.

Have sex with them and they turn into assholes. McQueen wasn't like that. But maybe he thought Cooper was, and that was why he'd acted so angry, hadn't even looked at him, hardly, since.

"Hawkes..." Wang said, and Cooper glanced over at him.

"Why'd you kick me?" he asked sharply.

Wang shifted, looking a little embarrassed. "I just think--we should let it drop, you know? You weren't there, the other night; they were yelling at each other. It got kind of nasty. Just leave it alone, okay?"

Cooper scowled. "Is that a rule? Like your three minutes?"

"Huh?" Wang stared blankly at him, and Cooper shoved his beer away and got up.

"Forget it. I'm gonna hit the sack."

McQueen had said he shouldn't expect anything special, just because they'd sexed. And Vansen said Meisner was an asshole, because he thought he had a claim on her. But--he _wanted_ something special. That was why he'd wanted to do it.

And he did have a claim on McQueen. He was in the 58th, after all, and McQueen was his commanding officer. He was a Marine.

He'd just have to show the Colonel he wasn't an asshole. Commodore Ross had called them the best the Marines had to offer, and McQueen had hidden it, but Cooper could tell he'd been proud.

#   #   #

They were back on patrol the next morning, and McQueen was there to brief them as usual. He looked coolly pleased with them, though, as he sent them off, and he nodded to Cooper again; Cooper felt a little better for that. The squad ended up in the rec room that evening, and he played poker with them for a while, but since he was losing anyway nobody seemed to think anything of it when he tossed his cards down and said, "I'm out. See you guys." The rec room was only two decks below McQueen's stateroom, and the stairs were just past the turn of the passageway.

He rounded the corner so quickly that he nearly collided with someone coming the other way, and he had begun a muttered apology before he looked up and realized he was face to face with McQueen. "Sorry, I--sir! Sorry, Colonel. I didn't see you." He hesitated, awkwardly; they were blocking each other's way. "Uh--were you heading for the rec room, sir?"

McQueen nodded acceptance of his apology, and asked, almost at the same time, "Where are you going, Lieutenant?"

Cooper shifted his feet. "Actually, sir, I was coming to look for you." He was afraid McQueen wouldn't like that, but when he glanced up the Colonel was smiling, just a little.

"I was going to see if you were in the rec room."

Relief washed through Cooper with a suddenness that left him almost dizzy. McQueen had come to find him, was smiling at him; he didn't think Cooper was an asshole. Cooper wanted to touch him, to go back to his stateroom where they could talk about the personal stuff, but McQueen had been on his way to the rec room, and it was more important to be with him in the first place than where they were. He glanced back in the direction he'd come. "They're all in there, playing poker. We could go join in...." He knew he didn't sound very enthusiastic; he didn't feel it. "If you want."

McQueen shook his head, still smiling, and nodded wordlessly toward the stairs. Cooper smiled back, and fell in beside him as they went up.

Inside his stateroom, McQueen went to his locker, rummaging through it. "You want something to drink?" he asked.

"Not booze. Coke?"

McQueen shook his head. "Apple juice."

"Sure. Thanks." McQueen handed him a glass, pulled the tab off a can of juice and poured half of it into Cooper's glass and the rest into his own.

"I came to look for you last night, sir, but you weren't here," Cooper told him. He was pretty sure, now, that McQueen wouldn't mind that he'd done it.

McQueen nodded. "Commodore Ross and I were talking until late, in his cabin."

"You and the Commodore know each other, don't you, sir?"

"We served together in the AI War, in the early fifties. We've kept in touch, as well as we could." He hooked the chair out from the desk and sat down. Cooper sat on the bed and sipped at the juice; it was sweet and warm, mellow in his throat.

"He likes you, doesn't he?" he asked.

"Commodore Ross? He's a good man, a good officer. We respect each other."

Cooper cocked his head. "Is that better than liking?"

"It's more important," McQueen told him, and then paused. "I don't know if it's better."

More important? "I respect you, sir."

McQueen was quiet for a few minutes, looking at him. "You--intrigue me, Hawkes," he said finally.

"Me?" There were plenty of things that fascinated Cooper about McQueen, but he was surprised that McQueen felt that way about him. "Why?"

McQueen rested an elbow on the desk and leaned forward. Cooper shifted under his eyes, a little self-conscious, but liking the scrutiny too.

"You were on your own years before most in-vitros are ever manumitted. You were sent here by a judge, but you've got the makings of a damn good pilot. And...." McQueen stopped, almost hesitating. "You were, what, a year and a half old when you escaped from the facility?"

Cooper thought for a moment, and shook his head. "Fifteen months, I guess."

"Fifteen months old, and you killed a monitor." McQueen's voice was low. "None of my batch would have dared. In the mine, dying like rats, none of us ever thought of rebelling. We'd been trained primarily as laborers, but even before the AI War in-vitros were always taught to fight. A reserve army, cannon fodder. We knew how to kill; the monitors made sure of that. But they'd made sure, very sure, that we would never dare use that knowledge against them. Never even imagine it." He was watching Cooper almost hungrily. "And at fifteen months old, you stabbed a monitor to death."

Cooper looked aside, awkwardly. It still made him nervous to think about it. "He was going to kill me. What was I supposed to do?"

"You were supposed to stand there and let him do it," McQueen answered harshly. "And at fifteen months old, I would have."

Cooper jerked his head back up to stare at him, startled. "You would've--" He hated the image McQueen's words gave him, McQueen young and trembling on the edge of the examination table, and the sharp glint of the knife as it stabbed down into his back; he shook his head violently, refusing to see it. "No."

"Yes," McQueen answered, just as forcefully. "I told you, once, you have a fire in you I never had. You did something at less than two years old that I couldn't even imagine until I was older than you are now. That's what kept you alive on the streets, and you can use it to make a life for yourself here, a better life. I admire that passion, that rage in you, Hawkes, and I respect it. I wish I'd had it."

Cooper was shaking. He'd only done what he'd had to, scraping by any way he could, and he respected McQueen's strength, the firm, competent determination he saw in the Colonel's eyes sometimes, more than anything he could imagine; far more than anything in himself. He got up and went to McQueen, put a trembling hand on his shoulder as McQueen looked up at him from the chair; their eyes met, and Cooper felt like the blue gaze was piercing him, pouring him full of aching, admiring desire.

"Can we sex?" He tightened his grip, feeling the arch of muscle and bone. He wanted to rub his hands over McQueen's back, wanted to feel it whole and alive. "Or I'll massage you...I want--"

McQueen stood up, put a hand over Cooper's and an arm around his waist. "Massage later," he said.

But when they were both naked and pressed against each other on the bed, Cooper sat up and pushed at McQueen until he was lying on his stomach, straddled his buttocks and began working his shoulders, wringing the tension from both of them with every kneading stroke. He dug his thumbs hard along the unscarred skin of McQueen's spine, knowing he'd kill any monitor who tried to backstab him, or any chig, either. Breath squeezed in a groan from McQueen's lungs as Cooper leaned his weight into the massage, and Cooper felt him slacken and relax as the exhalation left him. He ran his fingers up into McQueen's hair, then, feathery against his fingers, and worked the thin flesh of his scalp. McQueen sighed, his eyes closed.

"Turn over," said Cooper, and sat back, lifting up to let him move. "I'll do your pectoral." McQueen rolled over and was looking up at him now, his eyes on Cooper's face, while Cooper took his weight on his knees to spare the other's stomach and explored the chest muscle with careful fingers.

"It's fine, Hawkes," McQueen said, but didn't stop him. So Cooper stroked the planes of his chest, the brush of hair and the odd slickness of the scars. When he rubbed his thumb across a nipple it tightened a little, and McQueen's breathing deepened, so he did it again.

Their cocks were big, now, and hard. He shifted his weight to let them brush against each other, liking the feeling, and when McQueen's mouth opened a little he bent down and kissed him. He'd forgotten how sensitive his lips were, his tongue, after the night he'd spent in isolation, and he reveled in the sensation now, pushing his tongue into McQueen's mouth and feeling him lick it.

Then he remembered something else, and pushed himself upright again. McQueen was watching him with a warm, eager welcome, no wariness at all; he thought it would be okay to ask. "Sir? Can I put your penis in my mouth?"

"If you want," McQueen told him, and Cooper saw his eyes darken with desire.

Cooper wet his lips, and remembered the feel of fine hairs, brushing against his palm. "Can I--lick you other places?"

McQueen took a long breath. "Anywhere you like."

Anywhere? Cooper's mouth was suddenly watering, and he didn't know where he wanted to start. But McQueen was watching him, and he leaned forward with his weight on his hands and touched his mouth to the faded scars next to McQueen's left eye. They were barely visible any more, but with his lips he could feel the slight tightness of the skin, a small ripple that should have been smooth. It was almost the same place that Cooper's bruise from the basketball had been, and the ball's impact had stung like fire. He wondered what McQueen had felt, when the cockpit panel blew out at his face; he licked the scars, then exhaled gently, comfortingly, across the wet skin. McQueen murmured and turned his head.

Cooper nuzzled through his hair, chewing it and feeling it gritty between his teeth; he searched with his tongue for the scar over the ID plate, but couldn't feel it. Shrugging to himself--he didn't even know if they'd put plates in, twenty-four years ago--he moved down to lick the ear, liking the way McQueen's neck jerked when he slid his tongue right in. He did it again, but McQueen didn't arch up the same way, so he went on.

The earlobe was a small, fleshy flap in his mouth; he pulled at it a little with his teeth, flicking it, and the oddity made him smile. Moving along the smooth round rise of McQueen's left biceps he opened his jaw as wide as he could, trying to mouth the whole muscle; when he couldn't, he bit it gently, sucking at the skin. McQueen tasted like sweat and the cotton of his flightsuit; the crook of his elbow was salty, and his fingers in Cooper's mouth were like the smell of metal and like nothing Cooper had ever tasted before. He licked at the sharp edge of fingernail, and then sucked two fingers deep into his mouth to feel them inside him, firm and warm against the cushion of his tongue. McQueen's cock would be like that, only bigger. Cooper wanted to try sucking it, too, but he'd save it for last; he remembered what it had felt like when McQueen had done it to him for a moment, and he figured the Colonel wouldn't want him to stop, once he started. And he was having too good a time to stay in one place. He wanted to lick everywhere else he could, first.

The wet fingers slid into his hair when he shifted to put his mouth on McQueen's chest, and the prickle in his scalp as McQueen stroked him was like the flickering brush of chest hair across his lips, as he turned his head from side to side. A nipple puckered when he breathed across it, and he licked at the nubble of flesh and then sucked lightly, listening to the breath rasping through McQueen's lungs. But when he closed his teeth on it McQueen made a sharp sound of protest and pushed his head away. "Don't bite."

"Oh." He rubbed a palm across it in apology, thinking about Ephraim's fingers, pinching. "I think--I'd like it if you bit me there."

"I'll remember," McQueen said, and tugged Cooper's head back to his nipple. Cooper sucked it for him again and licked the scars, then squirmed further down on the bed.

McQueen's stomach was soft below the ribcage, heaving with his breath. Cooper pushed his face into the flesh there, trying to submerge himself, mouth and nose and eyes, until McQueen's stomach muscles tensed and stopped him. So he breathed in, trying to taste McQueen's heat and sweat in the air coming off his skin, and pressed his open mouth against the smooth belly. The skin was different here, thinner and warmer, and sweeter-tasting. McQueen was panting above him, and his hips jerked as Cooper licked through the dark tangle of pubic hair, rough and sweaty against his lips. He wanted to lick McQueen's cock, and he knew McQueen wanted him to; his hands only cradled Cooper's skull loosely, but Cooper could feel the urgency rushing through him like wind. He wanted to feel that wind blow wild through them both, but he wanted to finish exploring, too. He licked down the heavy muscle of a thigh and the ridge of shinbone, nipping at the hair, and sucked a toe before sliding back up to try all his favorite places again.

His lips were tingling: so many textures, so many tastes. McQueen's armpit was salty and wet, strong smell of sweat and deodorant, hairs between Cooper's teeth. His mouth tasted like apple juice and saliva, different from Cooper's, but good. And his crotch: Cooper buried his face in it, snuffling hard with his mouth open against the skin of McQueen's testicles, thin and wrinkly. Sweat here too, and semen that was dripping from his cock, and a lusher, ranker smell as well. He pulled McQueen's foreskin back gently and licked up the silver drop bulging from the tip; he'd expected it to be bitter, like McQueen had said, but it was sweet and good. McQueen's breath caught, and his fingers dug into Cooper's scalp. This time Cooper obeyed gladly; he put his lips around the end of McQueen's cock, and under the taut pressure of the hands on his head he bent further, letting it slip into his mouth.

It was more difficult than he'd thought it would be; when his teeth snagged flesh once McQueen almost yelped, and it was hard to keep them out of the way. But McQueen's cock filled his mouth with slick, urgent heat, and McQueen was trembling under him, his breathing hoarse and rapid. Cooper swirled his tongue around the tip, exhilarated that he could make McQueen groan with the pleasure Cooper was giving him. 

He wondered if he could sex McQueen like this, all the way, and what it would be like to have McQueen's semen spurting down his throat when he finished. It might choke him, the way he had choked McQueen before, but he didn't care. He licked harder, trying to rub with his tongue and lips, and McQueen's hips jerked, thrusting up; he groaned again, deep in his chest, and his fingers tightened in Cooper's hair. But when Cooper thought he was getting close, instead he pushed at his head again, forcing him away. "Enough. Cooper, stop."

Cooper let go and looked up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He hadn't expected that. "Why?"

McQueen took a deep, shuddering breath, between his teeth. "I don't--I don't want to come like that." One hand was still on Cooper's temple; the other was working, clenching into a fist and then stretching wide, over and over.

Cooper watched the restless movement, confused and a little worried. "Why not? Don't you like it?" Cooper'd thought he did, but he'd thought McQueen liked the sexing the first time, too, and something had gone wrong then. "Was I doing it wrong? I don't know nothing of what's in the books--"

" _Cooper._ Forget the books." McQueen held his breath for a moment; his free hand tightened once more and then relaxed. He stroked Cooper's head with the other. "It's great. You're incredible."

Cooper whuffed in relief. McQueen was calmer now, and smiling at him warmly, reassuringly; Cooper squirmed willingly up beside him when the Colonel tugged him close. He could feel McQueen against his skin, all the length of his body, and especially the hot spark where the tip of his cock brushed McQueen's hip.

"I always--wondered what that would feel like," McQueen told him quietly. "I didn't think I'd ever find out." Turning on his side, he rubbed a hand down Cooper's stomach, a broad caress that left a flaring swath of urgency in its wake. "But I don't want to come yet. There's other things I wondered about." He reached lower and touched Cooper's cock, fingering it lightly, testing its texture.

Maybe the Colonel wanted to explore, too. He'd said he'd never done any of it before, after all; but Cooper wondered what else he might have learned about in books, and grinned happily at him. "Okay." McQueen's grip tightened, and he rolled his hips and pushed into the stroking.

He kept his eyes shut, because it all felt so wonderful and somehow he could feel it even better in the dark. Teeth at his neck flashed goosebumps along his side, and strong hands kneaded the muscles of his arms and chest. When McQueen bit his nipple he grunted hard; it was a flare of not-quite-pain, a burning wire that yanked from his nipple to his cock, and he clutched McQueen's head and muttered "Do it again. Other side..." and McQueen moved over and did it again and he arched, trying to shove his nipple deeper into the sucking heat of McQueen's mouth.

Then the mouth was at his crotch, deep and hot, pulling him in, and he groaned and thrust up into it a little, trying not to go too deep. McQueen's lips were tight and wet, and the quick circling twist of his tongue around Cooper's cock dizzied him like the spin of his plane; he tossed his head against the pillow and clutched at McQueen for balance. Had he felt like this, when Cooper had done it to him? How could he have told Cooper to stop?

But then he did stop; Cooper shivered as the cool air of the room met the heat of his erection, and pushed up into the hand that McQueen wrapped around it. He opened his eyes briefly to see McQueen bending down again, and then there was a tongue licking at the tip of his cock, a palm cradling his balls, and a slippery-wet finger probing his anus, dipping in a little. Cooper didn't understand, but he spread his legs wider, to make room; his balls were tight, his cock throbbing, and now with the stretching pressure at his ass it was as though his whole body had narrowed to his groin, under McQueen's touch. When his cock was swallowed and the finger sank in deep he cried out; it was like nothing he'd ever felt, so intense, and when the finger twisted inside him he almost yelled with it, bucking.

McQueen paused and lifted his head, glancing toward the hatch. "Not so loud, okay?"

Cooper was panting, digging his heels against the mattress as he ground his crotch down on the amazing pleasure, front and back. "Sorry-- I--" he choked, and threw his forearm across his mouth, biting hard into his wrist as McQueen sucked him in again. And after that he barely knew anything, only that hands were on him, in him, everywhere his crotch was on fire with what McQueen was doing to him. He was writhing, trying not to scream around the bones of his arm, and McQueen's tongue drove him higher than the sky and then the finger inside him triggered a fireball that exploded in his cock and along his spine and behind his eyes and he did scream, and was lost in it.

Much later, it seemed, he came back to himself, struggling to awareness with a growing dismay. He was shaking violently, gasping, and he could remember thrashing helplessly on the bed. Like a neonate. He was drooling, too, he realized in horror; saliva ran down his cheek from where his teeth still clamped his wrist, and his eyes and nose were running. He dragged his arm out of his mouth and tried desperately to wipe his face, tried to choke off the heaving breath that wrenched his lungs. What would McQueen think of him, flailing and babbling incoherently like he had, as if he were still mindless in a crib--he fought, terrified, for control. But the pleasure was still surging through him, and he sobbed as it racked him, and felt McQueen's arm across his chest, McQueen's voice soft by his ear.

"Cooper. Shh." He tried to be quieter, tried hard, and when McQueen's leg came over his he turned on his side and clutched at him, still gasping, and McQueen's arms locked around his back and anchored him. "It's okay, Cooper. It's fine. Shh."

He buried his face fearfully in McQueen's shoulder, huddling there. He was still gasping; but McQueen was rubbing his back, gently, soothing him. Letting Cooper shake against him, taking the trembling into himself and easing it. And talking to him, quietly, comfortingly. McQueen wasn't angry, or--or disgusted. He just held Cooper tight, keeping him safe, as he recovered from the incredible things McQueen had done to him.

He was safe. McQueen didn't mind. Cooper hugged him hard, in a rush of wide and grateful joy, and made a small sound in his throat just to hear McQueen murmur his name again, stroking his skin. "Cooper. It's okay."

After a long time his breathing calmed, but it was a while more before he wanted to lift his head from the haven of McQueen's arms. When he did, he swayed a little, drained and dizzy. McQueen steadied him, then reached over to the nightstand to pull him a handful of tissues from the box. Cooper wiped his face and crotch, and tossed the wad into the can by the desk.

"Why were you crying?" McQueen asked him quietly.

"Crying?"

"You were crying."

Maybe he had been. He'd finished so hard, and he'd been so desperately, achingly relieved. "It's just--it was so good, what you did." He sniffled a little, and squirmed closer. "I thought, the other day, you were mad at me or something. When you wouldn't say anything to me. I thought maybe you didn't want to be with me any more." He hitched himself up on an elbow so that he could see McQueen's face, and added reproachfully, "I kept trying to get you to look at me in the briefing room, and you acted like I wasn't even there!"

McQueen frowned. He sat up a little, and although he didn't sound angry his voice was firm. "Hawkes, I'm your commanding officer. And as your commander, I will treat you, on duty, in whatever way I think appropriate for the good of the squad and the mission. That may include ignoring you, or roasting your ass, or whatever else I think is needed. That's my job. Trying to distract me from it will only get us both in a lot of trouble. Do you understand?"

Cooper sat up too and hugged his knees to his chest, nodding unhappily. "I know. I just--thought we had something special. And then you wouldn't even look at me."

McQueen's expression softened. He reached out to gently pry Cooper's arms free, taking one of Cooper's hands between his own and holding it, stroking a thumb across the palm. "We do have something special." Cooper looked up quickly, wanting to hear him say it again, and McQueen squeezed his hand in emphasis. "But that's why a relationship like this, with you under my command--well, strictly speaking the regs don't prohibit it, but it's not generally a good idea. It's too hard to keep the two things separate."

"I don't want to keep them separate!" Cooper protested. "I'm in the 58th. Being together," he glanced around the stateroom, and then down at their bodies, naked and close together in the bed, "intimate, like this--it doesn't keep you from being my commander too, does it?"

McQueen shook his head, with a slight smile. "Not if we don't let it. The regs are intended to prevent favoritism and coercion."

"Well, that's okay then." Cooper told him decisively. "You wouldn't do that."

"I'll certainly try my damnedest not to," McQueen agreed. "But that means that whatever goes on between us, in private like this, is not part of what happens when we're on duty. The way we look at each other, talk to each other--touch each other--it's different. You can't expect the things that happen in here to be reflected...out there."

"I know," Cooper said. "But--" He shook his head indignantly, remembering how shaken he'd been when McQueen had rolled away from him, staring at the ceiling and refusing to touch him. The confused fear that cramped his stomach when McQueen had ignored him the whole next day. That wasn't fair. "But you said you wouldn't treat me different, and then you wouldn't even look at me! That's not how you usually treat me! And in here, before I left, that wasn't out there, and you acted like you were mad at me then too." He pulled his hand back, and hunched his shoulders in angry dejection. "I thought I must've done something wrong."

McQueen took a slow breath. "No. You're right. And I'm sorry, Hawkes. You didn't do anything wrong. It was my fault."

"What was?"

"I didn't look at you," McQueen told him, voice low. "I couldn't."

Cooper looked up at him, surprised, and saw the other's eyes on him. McQueen was pale, and the lines around his mouth stood out as he frowned, unhappily. Cooper'd never seen him look like that, and even though he still didn't understand why McQueen had done it, he reached out and touched the Colonel's hand, where it lay palm down on the sheet. McQueen turned it over, letting his fingers curl around Cooper's, but he didn't look away from Cooper's face.

"Why not?" Cooper asked.

"I thought--" McQueen began, and paused. "Well. I'd gotten used to the idea that I'd...never have anything like this."

"Sexing?"

"Not just sex, although that too. But--someone special." His fingers tightened, again, around Cooper's. "It's been a long time since I realized I wanted it, and years since I thought I'd accepted the fact that I'd never have it. I'm the highest-ranking in-vitro in the Corps, Hawkes, the sixth-highest in all the armed forces. I've given the Corps my life. I didn't think it would give me back--a lover." He shook his head, ruefully. "And I sure as hell never thought it'd be a six-year-old under my own command. But I was curious about you, right from the day I heard you were in the new recruit class, back at Loxley. There aren't a lot of in-vitros in the Corps these days. And when you told me about escaping from the facility.... I couldn't have done what you did. I've never met another in-vitro who could have. I thought about you a lot, after that.

"And then you came bulling your way in here, with that--that incredible drive of yours, and you wouldn't stop until I'd admitted that I wanted you. You wouldn't listen to any of my...excuses, you didn't care that I was embarrassed--none of that mattered to you, so long as I wanted it. And it frightened me, how much I wanted it. Wanted you. I threw you out, because I was afraid I might never want you to leave." He slumped a little, as though his body weighed too much for his spine to support. "I'm sorry."

Cooper listened to him in astonished wonder, and with a growing sympathy that echoed in the hollow of his own years-long loneliness. "I didn't know you felt that way," he said. "Afraid. You didn't say." McQueen gave a little puff of breath, and Cooper hitched himself closer. "Are you still?"

McQueen shook his head. "In the briefing room, the next day--I thought, if I looked at you, everyone would know. What I was feeling, what we'd done. I couldn't look at you without remembering it. But...." He looked up and smiled at Cooper, a new, tentative smile that began to dissolve the unhappy tension in his eyes. "That was some damn fine flying yesterday, Hawkes. I watched you on the screen, and I knew I could do my job, be your commander, and not lose control. Because if I'm proud of you, if I think you're a first-class pilot, an in-vitro with a vitality, an ardor, I wouldn't have thought possible, and a man I'm very glad to know, it's because you are."

Cooper felt himself glowing: McQueen was proud of him. Proud of him even though they weren't kin, even though they didn't share that core of being that let Vansen's sisters be proud of her. He pulled McQueen into his arms, catching his mouth with his own; he wanted to feel McQueen's tongue filling his mouth, wanted to find a way to just strip their skins away and let them merge. "I'm glad," he whispered. "I'm glad...."

They were lying down, kissing and rubbing their whole bodies against each other. McQueen's cock was hard against Cooper's stomach, and although his own was throbbing too he ignored it. He wanted to sex McQueen this time, when he wasn't afraid any more; he wanted to make it as good for McQueen as McQueen had made it for him. He rolled them over, propping himself on an elbow, and cupped McQueen's balls, then leaned over and sucked at a nipple until he felt McQueen's breath catch in his chest. Cooper kissed his shoulder and waited for his eyes to open again.

"I want to lick your cock again. Like you did me." McQueen had stopped him, before, but he'd said he liked it, and Cooper still wanted to feel him finish in his mouth. Right inside him, almost under his skin.

McQueen took a deep breath, eyes locked on him, and nodded. "Please."

Cooper slid down his body, not breaking their gaze until his mouth was brushing McQueen's cock. The tip was warm and soft as he put his lips to it, mouthing the foreskin back, and sucked up the bubble of semen that was just appearing there. McQueen shifted his legs, restlessly, and Cooper opened wider and took it in.

He tried to remember what McQueen had done to him, and tried as well to keep his teeth from catching again. Lips tight around the shaft, he slid his tongue hard along the length, then bobbed his head down and up, pleased when he heard McQueen grunt, sharply. Another trickle of semen was warm on his tongue, and McQueen's hands tangled in his hair, urging him on.

He wished he could see McQueen's face, somehow, while he did this. Regular sexing didn't feel as intense, but he wanted to watch his mouth open and his eyes widen at the pleasure Cooper was giving him. All he could see now was McQueen's stomach and pubic hair, too close even to focus on. But he could hear him, breathing hard with every sucking pull of Cooper's mouth along his cock. He rubbed McQueen's balls and felt him jerk upward, deeper into Cooper's mouth; the movement almost choked him, but he didn't care, wanting to drive McQueen further, higher.

Then he remembered something else, and let McQueen's cock slip from his mouth just long enough to get a finger wet, reaching underneath to feel for his anus. McQueen's buttocks were tense and hard, but he pulled a knee up, and Cooper heard him mutter, hoarsely, "Oh. Yes...." Encouraged, he found the little ring of muscle and pressed in, feeling the tightness slide slowly the length of his finger, and the soft inside of McQueen's body after it.

McQueen's cock inside him, his finger inside McQueen; it was like what he'd tried to do before, burying his face in McQueen's stomach. Better than kissing, because McQueen was going to finish in his mouth, and then he'd have McQueen's semen deep inside him, in his belly. He bobbed his head again, licking hard, and stroked with his finger, and McQueen groaned harshly; he clutched Cooper's head in both hands and shoved deep, and Cooper hugged his hips and swallowed eagerly, happily, the semen tartly sour now and filling his mouth in pulses that pulled at his buried finger, as if McQueen's body were trying to swallow him too. He held McQueen's cock in his mouth even after the pulses ebbed, resting his head on his forearm propped on McQueen's heaving stomach, held it until it began softening again, fitting more easily on his tongue. The tightness around his finger eased, too, and he drew it out gently. McQueen's hands were stroking his hair.

"Cooper. Come here."

He slid up, and McQueen's arms came around his back, so that they were loosely hugging. "You've never called me Cooper before today," he murmured.

McQueen paused, then nodded. "Do you mind?"

"No. I like it." It was what his batchmates had called him. Damphousse called him Coop sometimes, but mostly the squad used last names, like all the Marines seemed to. He remembered the paper McQueen had shown him, the manumission certificate, and asked, "Can I call you Tyrus?"

"Ty," the Colonel said automatically; "I don't use Tyrus." He was silent for a moment, and then said, "Yes, if you want. Here. But it's not a good habit to get into."

Cooper nodded, understanding. In here was different from out there. He tried the shape of the name on his lips, but it didn't fit, somehow, and he shook his head. "I guess I think of you as McQueen. I mean, that's what I've always called you. And sir." McQueen chuckled at that, and Cooper pressed himself a little closer, happily. McQueen had said he could've, if he'd wanted to; that was what mattered. He smiled and licked his lips, remembering, and added, "I like the way your semen tastes." He could still feel it, warm and glistening on his tongue and in his stomach.

McQueen's arms tightened. "I'm glad."

#   #   #

Two days later they crossed the invisible line into the war zone itself. They weren't flying patrol any more; it was combat missions, now.

Cooper got into the habit of going to the Colonel's stateroom every few days, if he could. Sometimes McQueen wasn't there, or was busy; and other times the squad dragged in so exhausted from a mission that he could barely stumble through a shower and collapse into his rack. Sometimes McQueen would come find him, in the rec room or the gym, and Cooper would see the invitation in his smile and follow him back.

They didn't always sex. Sometimes, if McQueen had to work but the material wasn't restricted, Cooper would stay and look at the books, the pictures on the wall, and when McQueen would stop for coffee or a quick stretch Cooper would stand behind him and massage his shoulders. Other times, they'd just talk. Cooper asked about the people in the pictures, and McQueen told him a story about pilots who weren't in-vitros but were treated as if they were, a hundred years before in-vitros had even existed. Cooper hadn't known there was a time before people made in-vitros. It was a strange thing to think about. They worked out together too, spotting each other or running laps. And sometimes the Colonel joined the whole squad in the bar, and they all played poker or talked until late in the night watch, before Cooper went with the others back to the wardroom. McQueen didn't talk to him differently from the others, then, but Cooper could see a light in his eyes, when they looked at each other, that warmed him.

He was glad that none of the squad seemed to wonder where he was spending so much of his free time. Vansen came to the gym with him once and they all worked out together, and McQueen joined the rest of them that evening for a three-on-three basketball game; but when they were done Vansen headed off with a pilot from the 29th who had been watching and applauding as they played, and Wang went to log into the net, while the others said they wanted to get some rest and write letters, so that nobody noticed Cooper and McQueen ducking off toward the Colonel's stateroom. McQueen said he wouldn't get in trouble unless someone filed a grievance about the way he was handling his command, and Cooper knew that wouldn't happen; but he didn't really want to talk about it with the natural-borns, either. It was special, the way they talked and touched when they were alone: something just between them, like the smiles that no one else saw. When the cockpits dropped at the start of a mission he would give the others a thumb's-up, but the last thing he looked for, every time, was McQueen, watching from the observation window. Watching him go.

One of the missions was a recon flight: a survey of a couple of planets in the Indhi system, for an imminent assault. Hairy--the chigs owned that real estate, and it was only a few hundred MSKs from Tellus, where the battle to push them out and recapture the colony was still going on--but it should have been routine enough. Except that West went AWOL before the mission even got started, heading to Tellus on a crazy rescue plan of his own. Cooper and Vansen went after him and brought him back. And along with him two colonists, who'd managed against all the odds to survive for weeks in the wreckage, dodging the chig patrols; but only two, and neither of them was West's friend Kylen. They saw others, trudging shackled into the chig ship barely two miles away, as they ran for the rescue ISSCV; Cooper almost had to tackle West through the airlock doors, bombs exploding around them and West fighting Cooper's hands on him, screaming his friend's name.


	6. interlude: twilight

Cooper woke up in the night, in the darkened wardroom, because he heard a noise. Listening, he heard it again: a muffled, choking sound, snuffling.

He rolled over, looking up at West's rack. The natural-born was barely visible, a humped shape of blanket, shaking a little. Crying.

Down the line, Damphousse sat up in her bunk and looked over; he could just see her, dark in the darkness that was barely relieved by the starlight and the dim illumination of the glowstrip. He didn't move, watching as she got silently out of bed and padded over to West, reaching up to put a hand on his shoulder. West jerked and pulled away from her, toward the wall.

"Nathan?" she murmured. "Are you okay?"

"Leave me alone," he told her, thickly.

"You did everything you could. You saved those two women--"

"Yeah, I saved them! And Kylen--" He was crying again. "I was so close, I was...." He choked off, and Damphousse reached up to him again.

"You did everything you could," she repeated, and he flung himself away from her, tumbling clumsily down from his rack; Wang jerked awake as West shouted, "What the hell good does that do?" and stumbled away, into the head, slamming the hatch after himself.

Cooper kept motionless, watching. Damphousse said something quietly to Wang, and then went back to climb into bed again. Vansen didn't seem to be awake; or maybe she was just keeping still, too.

West had gone after the woman, Kylen. Even though she was almost certainly dead. Cooper had been wrong about that, though; there were survivors. And West had almost gotten himself killed--and Cooper too--trying to save her.

West would have died for Kylen. Cooper thought about that, and remembered lying in the dormitory, all alone, that last afternoon. He threw his blanket back and got up, making for the head.

"Hawkes," Wang whispered, "don't." But he ignored him, pushing the hatch open and closing it behind himself again, quietly.

West hadn't turned the light on, and even with the wan light of the glowstrip it was hard to see; Cooper felt for the row of sinks and trailed a hand along them as he walked. He could hear West in the shower room ahead of him. Getting to the end of the sinks he paused, listening, but the strip stopped there too, and he had no idea where in the blank blackness West was. So he took one step more, just into the shower, and sat down, arms around his knees. The metal floor was cold against his buttocks. He listened.

West was sniffling, but as Cooper sat down he demanded, "Who's there?"

"Hawkes."

"Leave me alone," West said. He sounded angry, but his voice was ragged.

Cooper didn't say anything. He remembered lying in the empty bunk, the one Suzanne hadn't slept in, and the way he couldn't seem to breathe, the way the air had torn at his lungs and his eyes had run.

"Didn't you hear me?" West demanded. "Fuck off, dammit."

Cooper shifted. "I don't understand."

"What don't you understand, tank? Why I--why somebody would be upset, when someone they love--"

"Why anyone would want to be alone," Cooper said, low.

There was no answer. He could hear West's breathing, harsh and clogged.

"When they killed Suzanne..." Cooper began slowly, and then stopped. He couldn't talk about it to a natural-born; they didn't have batchmates. They wouldn't understand. But Ephraim had stayed with him, that evening, close by until they got into bed, and he'd taken the next bunk over. And he had watched, as the monitor took Cooper away. Alone in the Philadelphia streets, Cooper had clung to the memory of Ephraim's eyes on him, Ephraim with him. Ephraim, long dead too.

"You would have died for her," he said, and West was crying again. "Oh God, God, if I could, please God, why her, why not me..." trailing off into harsh sobs, and Cooper hugged his knees and listened, remembering, and when water pooled in his eyes and overflowed he didn't move.

He didn't know how long he sat there. Eventually West's sobs faded to raspy breaths and hiccups, and slowly quieted.

Much later, he heard West ask, tentatively, "Who's Suzanne?" He didn't answer.

Some time after that, he heard him moving. Standing up? Cooper pushed himself up too; his legs were cramped and stiff, and his buttocks were sore. Shadowy in the dark he could see West coming toward him, one hand extended a little; he reached out and touched it briefly, letting West know where he was, and turned with him back toward the toilets. Under the glowstrip he could see, dimly, the row of sinks, the stall doors hanging half-open.

West pulled a handful of toilet paper from a stall and blew his nose, then went to a sink and washed his face. Cooper wiped at the dried trails on his cheeks, feeling the tightness of the skin, and splashed some water on himself as well; West glanced at him, and then away. But in front of the hatch he paused and turned around. Cooper remembered the way West had stared at him before the fight in the Belt, and how he had stared back, flatly, giving him nothing. It was different, now. He reached out, hesitantly, to touch West's arm.

West blocked the touch, but didn't push him away; he held Cooper's hand, briefly, in his, before letting go. "Thanks," he said quietly.

Cooper nodded, and West opened the hatch, and they crossed the wardroom and climbed silently back into their racks. Around them the squad breathed, sleeping or pretending to, but all of them there. Cooper dreamed, and in the dream he cried, and he didn't know if it was Ephraim holding him, or Ephraim for whom he was crying, or Suzanne, while McQueen held him, gently, and the humans, the squad, watched close by.


	7. US Naval Carrier Saratoga, Musae Sector

They had rendezvoused with supply ships every week or so since they had left Sol system, and usually the ships brought mail as well. Sometimes Cooper followed the others to mail call, watching as the names were read off and the natural-borns yelled and ran forward, one after another, to snatch eagerly at the envelopes, the postcards, the rare package. Their kin sent them letters, and their friends, too, sometimes. Cooper hung back, in the hatchway or off to one side, and wondered what it would be like to get mail like that.

Mostly, though, he didn't go. When the squad pelted off, he would head for the rec room, or maybe the library, although since his plane had been wrecked on Tellus he didn't have a disc player any more, and the listening station in the library was pretty beat up. He wanted another player, but the PX didn't have them, and he was a long way from the junk shop he'd found the first one in. Sometimes he would just go back to the wardroom when the ships arrived and wait for the others to come in, laughing and talking if they had gotten something, or glum if they hadn't.

This time it was the _Persephone,_ and scuttlebutt said that she was coming straight from Earth, so anything she was carrying would only be about five weeks old. They were playing poker in the wardroom when the mail call sounded, and the humans all slapped their cards face-down on the table simultaneously, heads snapping up as if they could see the ship through the bulkhead. "She's in!"

They were jamming their boots on, hurriedly, as if the letters would be taken away again if they didn't get there quickly. He stayed at the table, watching. "You coming, Coop?" Damphousse asked, and he shook his head.

"Nah. Nothing for me there."

None of them bothered to argue. "We'll finish the game when we get back," Wang said. "Don't you look at our cards!" In a moment they had piled through the hatch and were gone.

Cooper got up from the table and stretched. After a moment he lifted the corner of Vansen's hand to see what she was holding; they weren't playing for money, anyway, and he wanted to know if she was bluffing. When he bluffed, they always seemed to know. She wasn't, though. He didn't look at anyone else's.

The squad was back pretty soon, and they seemed to have forgotten all about the game anyway. Vansen and Damphousse both had letters, but neither of the others did; they watched the women opening theirs as if they could share. Damphousse curled up in her rack to read, but Vansen sat down at the table, ignoring the cards, and she had barely unfolded the letter before she shouted, "Hey, Anne's pregnant! I'm gonna be an aunt!"

Cooper looked up sharply. She was getting more kin?

"No kidding!" Wang leaned forward. "Terrific." The others chimed in too, congratulating her.

"She's wanted kids ever since I can remember. It's due in April."

"Boy or girl?" West asked, and Vansen shook her head.

"They don't know yet; they're going to wait for the amnio, later. But they're hoping for a boy." She was grinning happily.

Even Damphousse had looked up from her own letter. "Wow, Shane, that's great. Kids."

Kids. A baby, conceived and gestated inside Vansen's sister's body. Cooper had seen pregnant women, hugely waddling, in Philadelphia, and stared after them, unable to imagine how it worked. But it did, and they were born--naturally. He'd seen babies, too, incredibly tiny people. Kin to the parents, even more family for Vansen. She would be an aunt, soon, as well as a sister; she'd have a niece or a nephew.

"Do you want kids?" Wang was asking Vansen, and she nodded.

"Yeah, someday. I always wanted to be a Marine first, though. And then the war. But yeah, someday. What about you?"

"No way," Wang said, grinning. "I practically raised my youngest brother; that's enough."

West nodded. "Kylen and I wanted a family. We used to joke about it; we'd have three: a boy for her, and a girl for me, and one just for luck." He smiled, a little.

"I'd like children, some day," Damphousse said thoughtfully. "My boyfriend has a little girl. But now--I can't imagine it, you know? In the middle of the war."

Cooper listened to them with a distant, aching jealousy. They could make kin for themselves whenever they wanted, more and more people who shared a part of them. He looked from one to another of the natural-borns, seeing each of them in the middle of a kin diagram, like the monitor had shown them in the facility: lines radiating out to link every human with parents, siblings, and another line forming as he watched between Vansen and her sister's baby. All those connections, those ties that nothing could break, rooted in their essence. And himself: a black dot, connected to nothing. Hanging in a void, while all around him the natural-borns anchored one another in their families. He longed for that rootedness, achingly, hopelessly.

And then Damphousse turned to him. "Do you want kids, Hawkes? Someday?"

He gaped at her, then scowled. Of course he did. Children, cousins, anything. "Wanting's got nothing to do with it."

"Huh?"

He remembered the monitor's words from the lesson, heard them in his head again as he repeated them to her, curtly. "Humans conceive babies. I'm an in-vitro, remember? We grow in the tanks."

"Oh." Damphousse hesitated. "I didn't realize. I'm sorry." He shrugged. It wasn't her fault, after all. Vansen read the rest of her letter to herself, after that, and he and West and Wang reshuffled the deck and played a few more hands, just the three of them. He was actually getting better at the game, with practice.

He left mess early that evening, though, not following the squad down to the bar. He liked them all right; he even got along with West now, mostly. West hadn't called him any names, or anything, since the night in the shower. But he didn't want to listen to them talk any more about kin. It only drove home how isolated he felt, cut off inside his skin. He walked slowly through the passageways of the ship, ducking past the humans who ignored him or stared coldly after him as he went by, pacing through the broad, bright assembly deck and the narrower corridors below, past the flight deck where the cockpits waited, and the mixture of conversation and TV noise spilling from the rec room.

And just above the rec room, Colonel McQueen's stateroom. He'd known he'd end up there.

McQueen let him in, smiling at first, then frowning when he saw Cooper's face. "Is something wrong?"

"No, sir. Not really." It wasn't anything new, after all. He should be used to it by now. McQueen had been at his desk; Cooper could see star charts and papers laid out across it. "Are you busy?"

"Not very." McQueen squared off the papers and pushed them back, dropping a notepad on top of the stack. There was a thermos on the desk too; he unscrewed the cup that formed the top and Cooper could smell coffee, dark and strong. "Want some?" Cooper shook his head, and McQueen poured himself a cup and drank some, watching him. "Hawkes," he said quietly. "What's the matter?"

McQueen knew him so well. "Vansen's sister's pregnant," he blurted.

McQueen looked at him. "And?"

He jerked his head angrily. "And I just-- I just wonder what's it's like, you know? They've got all those families. All those kin. They make more any time they want!" He sat down heavily on the bed. "How come we don't get families?"

"We're tanks, Hawkes. That's the way it is." The words were flat, but McQueen's voice was almost gentle.

"Some of us find kin!" Cooper protested. There had been two in McQueen's batch, hadn't there? It was possible.

McQueen nodded. "Some of us. It's very rare. But among five and a quarter million, sometimes the genetic codes are close enough."

"Five million," Cooper repeated, slowly. "I never saw another in-vitro in Philadelphia, the whole time I was living there. After I escaped from the facility, I didn't see anyone until you."

"None?" McQueen looked back at him, surprised. "There's a tanktown in Chester, a few miles south of the city. You must have seen some. Maybe you just didn't recognize them."

Cooper shook his head. "I recognized you right away. The way you moved." But it was strange to think that there had been a whole neighborhood of tanks, living not far from him. He had huddled in the slum he had first found himself in, and never ventured very far outside it. What would it have been like, if he had gone to Chester, met other in-vitros?

But then he might not have been hired for that last construction job, and he wouldn't have been arrested when they attacked him. He wouldn't have met McQueen.

"You were in an in-vitro platoon, weren't you, sir?" he asked, and McQueen nodded.

"They desegregated the service in forty-nine. Before then, yes."

"What was it like? Here--" he waved a hand, taking in the whole carrier-- "it's all natural-borns, you know?"

McQueen looked past him, into the distance, thinking. "It was a little like another batch, I suppose. The training wasn't as strict as the facility had been. But we could never really forget that we weren't batchmates. It was better after they broke us up, integrated the Corps. Up to that point, we were always nipple-necks. After that--well, I was still a nipple-neck, but it made it easier to be a Marine. That's what I wanted."

"Did any of the platoon--try to find kin?" Cooper asked.

McQueen nodded briefly. "Some did. I didn't." He rinsed the cup out at the sink, screwing it back on the thermos and replacing it next to the stack of papers. "Cooper, some in-vitros let themselves get obsessed by the search. It's better just to accept what you are."

But in-vitros could have families. It was possible. "How come you never looked, sir?"

McQueen was still for a moment. Then he sat down, resting his hands flat on the desk, his neck bent. "I suppose--I was afraid," he said slowly. "That I wouldn't find anyone. Or that I would." He shook his head, a brief, tight movement. "I don't know what it's like, being kin. But I saw what it made Joanna do."

Cooper remembered reading through McQueen's genetic code, and how McQueen hadn't looked at him while he did it. He hesitated, feeling a thin wistful pain, and asked, "Were you glad, then, that we weren't?"

McQueen looked up sharply. "No. I wasn't."

"But you don't want kin. You said." Cooper didn't understand how he could not. Sometimes he thought he'd give anything to know what it felt like to have that connection, that bond at the deepest level of his being, with someone. He wished, achingly, that he could have had it with McQueen.

"No," the Colonel repeated. "It's not that." He turned away a little, looking out through the viewport at the stars. Cooper watched his face, and saw him breathing deeply, almost carefully. He was very still, thinking.

"I told you, I'd thought about you," he said finally. His voice was quiet. "From almost as soon as we met, you fascinated me. More so, the better I got to know you." One hand tightened, once, and relaxed again. "I wondered, sometimes, if we could be kin. But I didn't let myself think about it. I suppose--I would have wanted it too much, if I had."

McQueen did wish they were kin. The thin ache eased in Cooper's chest, as McQueen sighed and looked back at him.

"We're not. That's the way it is. And I won't tear myself apart, looking for a family I'll probably never find."

Cooper frowned at that. Giving up wasn't any good. But he didn't say anything.

"The Corps is my family," McQueen added. "This is where I belong, who I am. That's enough for me."

Enough? Cooper liked the Corps, liked being a Marine. He enjoyed flying, and combat was dangerous and frightening but sometimes, strangely, fun. Exhilarating. He liked the rest of the squad, maybe even West, now. The Corps gave him plenty of food, and clothes, and money. And he served with McQueen. They weren't kin, but--he supposed it was enough. Anyway, it was all he had.

McQueen pushed his chair back and came to stand over him. "Won't the squad be wondering where you are?" he asked, but there was heat buried in his eyes.

Cooper looked up at him and shook his head. "Nah. They're all in the bar, I guess. Playing foosball." He grinned. "I'm terrible at it. They won't miss me." And he lifted his hands as McQueen stepped toward him, and pulled him down onto the bed.

Sexing with McQueen was the best thing he had ever felt. The wet heat of McQueen's mouth, taking him in, and the way he shivered when Cooper did it to him. The strong, sure motion of his hands over Cooper's body, until Cooper's skin burned and he shook with wanting, and then McQueen caught him up and sent him flying to the finish, and was there to catch him again when he tumbled back against the bed and lay there gasping, feeling McQueen's hand holding his cock, McQueen's weight on his legs. Cooper didn't care, any more, if the room seemed to do a barrel roll around him sometimes, or if he cried out and convulsed helplessly in the bed; he knew McQueen would be there, waiting for him, when he recovered. And it was so good.

"That's so good," he said, when he could talk again. McQueen was lying next to him, one arm over his chest, watching him. He liked having McQueen watch him.

"I used to think about it a lot," McQueen told him. "What it would be like to do. To have someone do it to me."

"It was in the books?" he asked, and McQueen nodded. Cooper had asked at the library, once, but the sailor on duty had said they didn't have any books on sex, and he hadn't liked the way the man had stared at him. After that, he'd figured McQueen would teach him whatever he needed to know.

"I used to think about sexing too," he said now. "When I did myself. I remembered Suzanne and Ephraim." He grinned. "Now I think about you."

McQueen's eyes darkened, and he pulled Cooper to him so that they were lying on their sides, facing each other, and kissed him hard, tongue thrusting. Cooper opened his mouth wide, and put a hand on the Colonel's cheek to feel his jaw working. Then he slid the hand down to his chest, and rubbed his thumb across a nipple. McQueen's breath caught with the movement, and Cooper broke the kiss and pulled back a little to see him. He wanted to make McQueen gasp and clutch at him, too.

"Want me to rub your cock?"

McQueen's breathing was fast and shallow, now; he ran his hand down Cooper's side, armpit to hip, then squeezed his buttock, pulling them together again. His cock pressed against Cooper's stomach. "Maybe. But...." He paused.

"What?" Cooper brushed the nipple again and felt him tense. "Something else you thought about?"

McQueen nodded; his fingers tightened in flesh. "Have you ever been fucked?"

_You're fucked_ had only meant one thing in Philadelphia. "You mean, like, messed up? Been in bad trouble?"

McQueen let out a short puff of breath. "No. Fucking is--a way of sexing."

"How?" Sometimes he wondered just how much there was to know about it. His batch had never imagined most of the things McQueen had shown him.

McQueen rubbed his ass. "What I do with my finger, sometimes...."

"Inside?" Cooper liked that. A lot.

"Yes. Only with my cock."

In his anus? Cooper frowned dubiously. "It seems kind of big. I mean, your finger's great, but...."

McQueen nodded, still rubbing. "You have to loosen up, get ready. I think--you might not like it. Or you might." He pulled Cooper's top leg over his own, and slipped his fingers further around, teasing the opening.

Cooper lifted his knee up a little, making room. "The books say it's good?"

"That's what they say."

There was an image, a memory, he was reaching for. The film. "Is it like when a natural-born man and woman do it, only in her vagina?"

"Yes. You can fuck either place." A finger was easing into him now, pressing through the tightness, and McQueen's cock was hot and hard against his stomach.

"That's what you want to do?"

"Yes," McQueen said, low.

The human woman in the film had seemed to like it. And if he didn't, so what? There was a fine-drawn tension running through McQueen's body, taut with desire, and Cooper wanted to do whatever he wanted that much. "Okay," he said. "How?"

McQueen forced a deep breath, shuddering a little. "You sure?"

"'Course I'm sure. How?"

"Uh." McQueen kissed him, then pushed him away, sitting up again. "We need a lubricant." He leaned over and opened the drawer of the nightstand, rummaging inside to come up with a small plastic bottle of oil, half-full.

"Massage oil?" Cooper asked. Saliva worked pretty well for rubbing, but he remembered that oil had been better.

"Mineral oil, with vitamin E. They gave it to me to help the scarring." McQueen flipped the top up and squeezed some into his palm. "Turn over, on your stomach." Cooper rolled obediently and felt McQueen's hands, slippery now, probing between his buttocks. He spread his legs wider, and a warm palm covered his balls from behind, while a finger slipped into him again, more easily this time.

It felt good. Not as good as it usually did, when he was desperate to be sexed; his cock was only half-hard now, the urgency much less. But it was fine, and he murmured and pushed back a little.

"Relax," said McQueen, behind him. "Just--be easy. Open up."

Two fingers, now, and the stretching was more pronounced, but the slight cramping ache eased as McQueen worked the ring of muscle. It was like a strange kind of massage, Cooper thought, and smiled again, to himself. Then McQueen pulled him still farther open, and he grunted in surprise.

The fingers paused. "You okay?" McQueen asked.

"Yeah," Cooper told him, and concentrated on relaxing, the way he used to when Suzanne dug her fingers hard into his back. It helped, like it had then, and McQueen stretched him until he felt slick and gaping wide, like he could suck McQueen's cock into his ass with nothing but pleasure. Then the fingers left him, and McQueen's weight settled onto his back. It reminded him of the dream he'd had, the first night on the _Saratoga;_ but in the dream, too, he'd wanted to turn over. "Wait," he said. "I want to be able to see you." McQueen lifted up again, and Cooper twisted around to look over his shoulder at him. "Can we fuck with me on my back?"

McQueen rubbed a palm down his leg. "I think it's easier for you if you take me from behind. Especially the first time."

"Is that what the books say?" Cooper asked, and McQueen nodded.

Cooper could feel the urgency in McQueen's restless hand, and he wanted to watch McQueen find all that pleasure he was yearning for in Cooper's body. He turned farther over, onto his side, and remembered something McQueen had told the squad once. "I want to be able to see you," he repeated. "What's easy got to do with it?"

McQueen looked surprised for a moment; then he nodded. "Tell me if it hurts." He shifted back to let Cooper roll over, and reached for the oil again; pouring another palmful, he began to rub it over his penis. Cooper watched, then put a hand out, stopping him.

"Let me do that." He sat up, took the oil and greased his hands, then wrapped them around McQueen's cock, stroking. He liked the curve of cock in his hands, McQueen's eyes on him as he rubbed, but he didn't try to draw it out, only got him thoroughly slippery and then lay back again, wiping his hands on his stomach. "How do we do this?"

McQueen took a shuddering breath, and reached to tug the pillow out from under his head. "Lift up," he ordered, and doubled it under Cooper's ass, so that his weight was thrown back onto his shoulders. He pushed Cooper's knees toward his chest, and slid a finger briefly into his anus again. "You okay?"

Cooper grabbed his shins and pulled his legs back farther. "Yeah. It's a little weird. Go on." McQueen knelt below him, then, and Cooper felt the tip of his cock press inside. It was bigger than his fingers, but the stretching felt good. And McQueen was moving inside him, now.

McQueen braced his palms on either side of Cooper's shoulders, watching him with an intensity that pressed Cooper back on the bed, as his chest did resting on Cooper's knees, and at the same time seemed to pull him up to meet those demanding eyes. Cooper lifted a hand to his face, stroking it. McQueen pushed forward a little more, then, and Cooper could feel his body opening, making room for McQueen to work his way inside. He remembered the first time he had sucked McQueen's cock, how good it had felt to take McQueen inside himself like that, and he wished they could kiss while they did this. He wanted McQueen's tongue in his mouth, wanted the Colonel inside him every way they could do it. McQueen was pressing deep, and Cooper saw the pleasure surge from his crotch, rippling up the whole length of his body so that he gasped and his eyes unfocussed, and he swayed on the prop of Cooper's legs. He groaned, too, as he came all the way in, and Cooper felt the sound echo all through himself: in his ass, and his knees pressed to the rumble of McQueen's chest, and his hand on McQueen's face.

Then McQueen squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, panting, and when he opened them again the pleasure in them was leashed, throttled back. He stared down, searching Cooper's face, and his voice was hoarse and strained. "Does it hurt?"

Cooper gripped the curve of McQueen's skull in his hand. "Why do you keep asking that?" Even if it did, a little, he didn't care. What mattered was the way McQueen had looked, had sounded, as Cooper took him in, and how it felt to Cooper to be so achingly filled with him, touched from the inside. "It feels good, doesn't it?" McQueen shivered and nodded, and the tense concentration on his face shattered as Cooper tightened around him, caressing him with the muscles of his ass. "Then fuck me," Cooper told him. "C'mon."

McQueen started moving, then, pulling back and thrusting into him again. The strokes lit hot wires through Cooper's cock, up his legs and spine; with each one McQueen's cock filled him, suffused him, gorged the aching hollow of his gut. McQueen groaned again, a tight straining rasp in his throat, and sweat ran down his face, under Cooper's hand. Cooper wanted to taste it, lick it up and swallow it, but he couldn't reach, so he slid a finger into McQueen's mouth, and McQueen sucked at it, his tongue working like Cooper's ass stroked his cock. Cooper reached up with his other hand and rubbed a nipple and McQueen jerked, lunging deep inside him, his voice cracking in a wail. Cooper grabbed his shoulders, then, steadying himself, and squeezed his shins around McQueen's ribs, urging him on.

"Come on," he whispered. More than anything, he wanted to see McQueen finish, like this, overwhelmed and lost in his body, all that fierce determined strength given over into his care. "Come. Finish. Give it to me..." and McQueen's back arched, grinding his cock in; he gave a choking cry and froze, then pulled out and rammed in again. Cooper could almost feel the hard hot pulses of McQueen's semen jetting high up into him. McQueen was still crying out on a high wail, his eyes blind and wild with the ecstasy he'd pulled to himself from deep in Cooper's body, and Cooper braced him, knees and hands clamped tightly around his torso, watching.

Then the breath went out of him, suddenly, like an airlock venting; his elbows collapsed and he almost fell onto Cooper's chest. Cooper got his knees out of the way and eased him down; he felt the cock pull from his ass with a stab of soreness, and his legs were stiff, but none of that mattered. McQueen was limp and exhausted, gasping now, trembling against him and running with sweat, and Cooper hugged him, rubbing his shoulders, feeling safe, and proud, and strong.

"Oh," said McQueen, weakly, a long time later.

Cooper stroked him, gently. "It's okay."

"I didn't--know it was like that." Then he tensed a little, forcing himself up on an elbow. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"Why do you keep asking that?" Cooper said again, and pulled him back down.

McQueen shook his head in the curve of Cooper's neck. "The books said it could hurt. If you weren't relaxed. If you didn't want it." His hands groped for Cooper's shoulders. "I didn't want to hurt you."

Cooper smiled. "I was relaxed," he said softly. "I wanted it. You didn't hurt me."

"Did you--like it?" McQueen asked, muffled.

"Yes." Cooper rubbed a foot along the Colonel's leg. "Did you?" There was no answer, only a tightening of the hold on his shoulders.

But eventually they had to separate. Cooper's anus felt sorer now than it had while McQueen was fucking him, and semen was seeping from him. He pulled his clothes on and went down the passageway to use the can and wipe himself off, and when he came back McQueen was dressed too.

"I wish we could spend the night together sometime," Cooper said wistfully as they were straightening the bed.

McQueen nodded, but he looked serious. "I don't think it's a good idea."

"I know, sir. I just wish." He'd like to be able to fall asleep hearing McQueen's breathing, close by him in the dark.

"You want some coffee?" McQueen picked up the thermos again, and this time Cooper nodded. "There's only the one cup," McQueen told him, unscrewing it, and poured some; Cooper drank half and handed it back. It was still hot, tasting rich and strong.

"Wish we got coffee that good. The stuff in the mess tastes like it was made from burnt bread." McQueen cocked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "That's what Wang says, anyway. It's not so bad...but yours is better."

McQueen finished the cup and smiled, rinsing it out at the sink before screwing it back on. "It should be. I paid twenty dollars a pound for this, plus freight to have it shipped out here. Arrived today on the _Persephone._ "

"You bought it--through the mail?" Cooper hadn't realized that was possible, but it gave him an idea. "Can you buy anything that way?"

"If there's a company selling it mail-order. There are certain things it's not legal to send through the mail: weapons, explosives. Why?"

Cooper sat down on the bed again, leaning his back against the wall; he thought the Colonel would take the chair at his desk, the way he usually did, but instead he joined Cooper on the bed, crosslegged and facing him. Cooper stuck out a leg, so that it brushed against McQueen's knee. "I've got this old music disk. A CD, it's called. Only my player was in my plane when I went down on Tellus, and it got wrecked. You think I could get another one that way?" It would mean he'd get mail, too, like the others.

McQueen nodded thoughtfully. "I think I've seen a listing for antique electronics somewhere; I'll track it down for you. You'll probably have to write and ask what the store has in stock. But you shouldn't have much trouble finding one; they were still being made up to fifteen years ago."

Fifteen years ago sounded like ages to Cooper. He stretched his leg out a little more, reminding himself that fifteen years ago McQueen had already been older than he was now. He guessed a lot of things had changed in that long.

"You like music?" McQueen was asking him, and Cooper nodded.

"Yeah. Some kinds."

"What kinds?"

He had to think about that; the first word he'd thought of was "loud," but that wasn't right, because sometimes he'd played the disk quietly, too. He'd had to, any time his mike was live, but other times he'd just wanted to. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, trying to remember what it sounded like and put that feeling into words. Drums pounded in his memory, and the singer's voice screamed.

"Angry," he said finally. "Strong."

But there was more, too. The music had surged through him, wailing shrilly in his skull, and working a throbbing pulse through the knot he felt sometimes in his gut Working it loose. "Sad," he added, and opened his eyes. "Does that make sense?"

"Yes," McQueen told him quietly. "It makes sense." He put a hand on Cooper's knee, firm and warm. "Sad, and angry...and strong, too. That's you, Cooper. The drive in you, the fire: that's what you're talking about. That's what you're hearing." His fingers tightened.

Cooper grinned. "Really?" Sometimes he'd shouted along with the singer, the song rushing through him and out again with the air through his lungs. It had felt good, inside him. He put his hand over McQueen's and scooted a little closer. "What kind of music do you like, sir?"

McQueen smiled at him and got up to flick a switch by the desk. Cooper jumped as speakers under the ceiling came blaringly to life, and McQueen winced and turned the volume down, until the music was no louder than quiet talking. Then he came back to the bed and sat down, watching Cooper.

Cooper listened to McQueen's music for a while, feeling it out. It didn't have a fast beat like his had, but that made it more powerful, in a way, like deep slow breathing instead of a shallow pant. The instruments were mostly pitched low, and the singer's voice soared above them: like they were supporting him, Cooper thought, holding him up. The words were in a language he didn't know, but they sounded firm and strong. Angry, maybe, but not flailing, not enraged; just determined. Like Colonel McQueen.

"Yeah," he said. "I like it."

"So do I," McQueen told him. He leaned back against the wall and put his arm around Cooper's shoulders; Cooper pressed close to his side, feeling the weight of McQueen's arm on him, holding them together. He breathed slowly, matching himself to the rise and fall of McQueen's chest, the steady, rolling power of his music. When the song ended Cooper could still hear it, feel it, in their bodies.

"What do the words mean?" he asked, finally.

"They're Latin," McQueen said. "It's a hymn, a song of praise to God."

Cooper made a face. "I thought you didn't believe that stuff."

"I don't believe it. But I respect it."

Cooper turned under his arm to look at him. "I don't understand. How can you respect it, if you don't believe it?"

McQueen closed his eyes for a moment. Cooper wondered if he could still hear the music too; he looked pensive, sort of like he was listening. Then he looked back to meet Cooper's gaze.

"Religion can bring out the worst in people," McQueen told him. "It's caused more wars, more bloodshed, and more hatred than anything else in human history. I've met people who don't believe that in-vitros have souls.

"But it can also bring out the best. It can serve as a focus for moral integrity, for probity and faith. I don't believe in it, but I respect its power." Cooper squinted a little, thinking; McQueen eyed him and shook his head. "You still don't understand."

"Yeah," Cooper assured him, "I do." A soul was the thing Pags had told him about, that supposedly lived forever, but he didn't believe that. He wasn't sure what probity was, but he could pretty much tell what McQueen meant from the way his voice had sounded, serious and quiet, and the other words he'd used. And he definitely understood being wary of something powerful.

McQueen smiled wryly at him. "No, you don't. But it's all right." He gave Cooper a quick, hard squeeze, one-handed, then got up and stretched, arching his back and pulling his arms out behind himself. "Remember that religion is important to a lot of humans, Cooper. If you act contemptuous, they'll get upset, and it's very rarely worth it."

Cooper nodded. He'd been to enough funerals since the start of the war to have worked that out. He would just stand at attention and think about the people who had died, if he'd known them, while the natural-borns prayed to God or whatever it was they did.

He got up and stretched too, then wandered to the desk and glanced down curiously at the inch-high stack of papers and flimsies on it. He began to pick up the notepad that almost covered them, wanting to see them better, but behind him McQueen said sharply, "Hawkes. Leave that."

He dropped the notepad onto the pile again. "What are they?"

"Status reports, tactical projections. They're not classified, but they're command briefs--nothing you should be reading." He came up beside Cooper and pushed the papers farther back. The edge of one of the star charts curled up as the weight slid off it, and a pen tumbled and rolled almost off the desk before Cooper caught it and put it on top of the pad. He could see notes written there, in McQueen's square, blocky handwriting, but they were upside-down to him, and obediently he didn't try to read them.

McQueen picked up the thermos and shook it, listening to the faint gurgle, then unscrewed the cup. There was barely enough coffee left to fill it half-way, and he shrugged and drank it in a couple of swallows. "I'll have to make some more."

"Can I have some more, too?" Cooper asked, and McQueen shook his head, smiling.

"You'll never get to sleep. It's almost twenty-two thirty."

"You're drinking it," Cooper pointed out.

He snorted a little. "I've got that pile of reports to read through, and a summary, with options ranked and weighted, to present to the Commodore at eight-fifteen tomorrow. I'll be awake for a good while yet."

"I'll go, then, so you can work."

McQueen glanced over at him. "You're welcome to stay, if you want. They're not that restricted."

Cooper shook his head. If he stayed, they'd talk now and then, like they always did, and it would take McQueen even longer to do what he had to do. The Colonel had told him early on that he should get all the sleep he could manage, in combat, and he figured that went for McQueen as well. "It's okay. I'll see you tomorrow, sir."

McQueen nodded. "All right, then."

Opening the hatch, Cooper looked back at him from the stateroom's threshold, half inside and half outside. "Goodnight, sir," he said.

"Goodnight, Lieutenant," answered the Colonel formally. But their eyes met and held, until the heavy metal of the hatch swung shut between them.

The others were just getting undressed when he came into the wardroom, and he sat on his rack to pull his boots off and then joined them at the lockers. They were talking about the fighting that was supposed to be going on over Procyon, but they looked up, curiously, as he came in.

"Hey, Hawkes, where've you been?" Wang waved a hand, smiling. "We were gonna whip the one-thirty-third on the basketball court, but we couldn't find our center!"

Cooper shrugged. "Around. Sorry." He stripped the flightsuit down off his hips and stuffed it away, following it with his t-shirt and shorts.

Wang looked him up and down. "Okay, give. Who is she?"

"Who?"

They were all grinning at him, suddenly. "Your girlfriend," Wang said. "I mean, why else would you have let your squad's honor down on the court tonight?"

He shifted, uncomfortable; he was pretty sure they were teasing him, and he didn't like it. "I don't have a girlfriend." He wasn't even entirely sure what they meant; but he knew he didn't have one.

Damphousse raised an eyebrow. "Boyfriend?"

"Huh? No." He closed his locker and would have turned away, but Vansen was in front of him, grinning, showing her teeth.

"C'mon, Hawkes. You got something going, don't you? What's the big secret?"

Then West said, sharply, "Leave him alone," and they all looked over at him, surprised, Cooper most of all.

"Leave him alone," West said again. "It's his business."

The other three exchanged glances, and then turned back to him, more serious now. "Sorry, Hawkes," Vansen said. "Just teasing, you know?" He nodded, curtly, and turned for the racks, but Wang stepped in front of him again, blocking his way.

"It's your business," he said, still smiling. "But maybe you oughta take a shower?" He gave Cooper an exacting once-over, eyes glinting, and sniffed deliberately.

Cooper glanced down at himself, and inhaled in angry realization. There was a small bruise over his left nipple, where McQueen had bitten it for him, and his pubic hair was clumped and matted. And now that he was naked he could smell himself, like Wang must have been able to: the sweetish-salty tang of sweat and semen.

But he didn't want to tell them about it. It was his business, like West had said, his and McQueen's. Vansen had said they were just teasing, and that meant he didn't have to answer. He didn't want to take a shower, either; he liked the smell of McQueen on him. Wang was smirking at him, and he didn't say anything, only glared back and waited, stonily, until the natural-born faltered and dropped his eyes, edging out of the way. Then he got into his rack, ignoring them all, and pulled the sheet up around himself. Sometimes, if he pulled it tightly enough, he could imagine, in a doze, that it was McQueen's arm around him.

The others were in bed too, and West, nearest the switch, had turned the light out. He lay on his side in the dimness, listening to the humans breathe. It was very quiet.

Eventually Wang spoke, haltingly, into the silence. "Hawkes? Look, I'm sorry--I didn't mean anything. Okay?" He hesitated, then repeated, "I'm sorry."

Cooper remembered Perlick, snarling an apology at him through bloodied teeth. Wang sounded embarrassed and uncertain. Worried that Cooper was angry at him.

They were the 58th. His squad; his friends. And they'd only been teasing him. "Sure," he answered, quietly. "It's okay." He heard Wang exhale, and he rolled over and closed his eyes.

The klaxon howled them awake at 0117; General Quarters was sounding, and they flung on their gear and dashed to the flight deck, only to wait there, ready to take off on ten seconds' notice, while the _Saratoga_ and a chig battle cruiser picked a careful path around each other. McQueen was there ahead of them, with a terse briefing straight from Commodore Ross. The Commodore didn't want to engage; they were heading for Clio to support an imminent push there, and they couldn't afford the delay or the damage that a battle now might mean. The chigs didn't seem to want any action, either, but if they launched fighters the 58th had to have wheels up a bare instant later. So they sat in their cockpits, tensely ready; they couldn't even leave to use the head, but had to hook into the awkward onboard plumbing. It was bad enough in space.

At 0150 the mess sent up breakfast. None of them had much appetite, but McQueen ordered them to eat a little; protein and carbohydrate would keep their energy up, if they had to fly. Then he pulled one of the ground crew aside and spoke to him briefly; the man saluted and jogged away, to return a few minutes later with the thermos.

McQueen took it from cockpit to cockpit, and Cooper dumped the remains of the coffee the mess had sent into his plate, flooding the greyish yellow eggs in greyish brown liquid, and held his cup for the Colonel to fill. Black, even stronger than before, and he drank it slowly, savoring. He could understand, now, why Wang complained so much about what they got in the mess. Around him, the others were drinking too, and McQueen was pouring more for Damphousse, who had gulped her first cup down. He came around again to the others and ended at Cooper, pouring the last of it for him; it just filled the cup again. Their eyes met as Cooper swallowed, and he saw McQueen's lips move, silently. _Stay cool, Hawkes._ Cooper gave him a tiny nod.

From across the deck West said, with feeling, "Thank you, sir. We needed that."

McQueen straightened up from his crouch by Cooper's cockpit and looked around at them all. "If that doesn't keep you awake," he said, "we can sue Starbuck's."

There was a low ripple of laughter. "No fear, sir," answered Damphousse wryly. "They'd better scramble us, because there's no way I'm getting back to sleep now."

But they didn't. At 0420 the order finally came to stand down, and the squad climbed stiffly out of their pits and trudged back to the wardroom, peeled off their clothes and fell back into bed, to sleep right through the forenoon watch.

#   #   #

Three days later the _Saratoga_ dropped anchor in orbit around Melpomene, the next planet out from Clio. The whole system was hot, fighting going on on Clio as well as in the space around the planet, and they expected to be sent into combat right away; but they didn't expect the mission they got, when McQueen strode into the briefing room at 0745.

"Okay, listen up!" he barked, and they all straightened, reflexively, in their seats. "This one's on the ground. We're going in on-planet as support for a push to drive the chigs out of a surface installation. You'll be issued a full pack, with three days' rations; gear up and report to the ISSCV loading bay at 0900."

They were all staring. "A ground assault?" West demanded. "Sir, we're pilots!"

"We're Marines, Lieutenant," McQueen snapped. "We follow the orders we're given." He pulled down a display screen and gestured at it. "The chig base on Clio is of major importance to intelligence. We can't just carpet-bomb it from space, we need to capture it intact. And a lot of the Army's troops are still tied up in the Procyon action; they need our help here, so we're going in." The display showed a schematic map of rough terrain, a ragged splotch of blue indicating human-held territory and a much larger red stain for chig real estate. McQueen touched the pointer to a black square, halfway to the center of the red.

"This is the primary target. The Third Infantry will be moving on it frontally, from the east and north. Their attack is threatened, however, by a chig artillery emplacement on their flank, _here._ " He pointed to a smaller dot, southeast of the black square. "That's our objective. We'll be inserted by ISSCV and make our way on foot to rendezvous with an Army unit; we support their assault on the emplacement. It gets taken out right before the main attack begins. Clear?"

"You're coming with us, sir?" asked Vansen, and McQueen nodded. Cooper felt a thrill of pleasure through his chest. McQueen was grounded; he couldn't fly with them. But he could lead a ground assault. Cooper decided he didn't mind ground-pounding at all.

He didn't even mind shouldering the heavy ALICE pack he hadn't humped since training. They were getting geared up in the wardroom, and around him most of the others were talking about the mission. "It doesn't make sense," West was still saying. "We're _pilots._ "

"So it doesn't make sense," Wang told him. "Welcome to the military. You only just figured that out?" He heaved the pack onto his shoulders, canteens gurgling. "'Lightweight,' my ass," he muttered, and then added, more loudly, "Come on, ALICE. Through the looking glass."

"It's no wonderland," Vansen said, which didn't make any sense either, but Cooper didn't bother asking. Sometimes it wasn't worth the time.

"You got your Bears shirt on?" he asked Wang, and Damphousse rolled her eyes, but Wang grinned at him.

"Better believe it."

McQueen appeared in the hatchway then, and they came more or less to attention. He surveyed them all and nodded. "The packs'll be lighter on planet; surface gravity is ninety-three percent," he told them. "All set?" And they followed him down to the loading bay, where his own gear was already on the ISSCV, and trooped aboard.

Insertion was smooth enough--the LZ and its approach, at least, were secure--and ninety minutes later they emerged from the transport, on planet. Cooper looked around curiously. The ground was covered with a mat of greenish-brown plant fibers, scorched to black where the landing jets had played, and growths that looked sort of like trees sprouted out of it here and there. A pale blue haze filled the sky, shading to green toward the horizon; the sun was a glaringly-bright blur behind it, and too high for mid-morning. The air was chilly, thin and sharp on his tongue. A hundred yards downslope the Army encampment was a mass of khaki tents, and McQueen told them to wait and headed off to talk to a woman who had emerged to meet them as the landing blasts dissipated.

"Wow," murmured Damphousse, gazing around. "My first alien planet."

The others glanced at her, surprised. "What about Mars?" asked Wang.

"Oh--yeah." She shrugged a little. "But we were in suits, there. This is different." She flexed her knees, testing the gravity, and took a deep breath of the strange air. "Besides, that was still our solar system. From here, that's practically home."

Vansen nodded. "You're right; this is different." Then she shot a sideways glance at West. "'Course, for some of us it's not our first alien planet, is it?" West flushed a little.

McQueen had returned from his brief conference, now, and he called them into line. "Okay, we're heading out. Single file, and keep the noise down. Let's go."

The ground was slightly springy underfoot, the matted fibers resisting as Cooper walked. It was hard to get used to, after so long on metal decking; with the odd footing plus the lighter gravity, he felt almost dizzy for the first hour or so of the march. But after a while he got used to it, and even began to enjoy it. The tree-like things were scattered at intervals of a few yards, and varied from waist-high to about forty-five feet, with knobbly brown trunks and a spray of yellow or red fronds at the top that threw flickering candy-colored shadows on the ground. Here and there he saw a little sprout working its way up between the tendrils of the ground cover. The terrain was gently rolling, and there didn't seem to be any landmarks; McQueen checked the inertial locator every half hour or so, and adjusted their heading. Cooper didn't see any birds, but the sky was pretty.

They marched for hours, talking quietly; they were in human real estate, and although they carried their rifles ready, nobody really expected problems. When they stopped to eat Cooper and Damphousse went off a little way for a head call, guarding each other, and found that they had to cut through the ground cover with a K-bar before they could dig a hole.

After the meal break McQueen ordered them to march in silence, and keep a more careful watch. The trees grew more thickly packed, some of them scrubby and low to the ground so that it was harder to pick their way, and the ground was getting rougher. It was almost 1900 by their watches, and well into a long local dusk, when a call from ahead stopped them short, weapons swinging up. "Calliope!"

"Euterpe," McQueen answered, and a couple of soldiers appeared from behind a tangle of shrubs thirty yards ahead. Cooper relaxed, lowering his rifle.

"Even in this light you look more like Marines than chigs," one of them called. "You the 58th?"

"That's right. Lieutenant Colonel McQueen."

"Captain Jenning's expecting you, sir. I'll take you in." The lieutenant who had spoken saluted and fell in with them, while the private with him went back to her guard post.

The Army unit was dug into a hillside a couple hundred yards further on; there were a handful of foxholes covered by camouflage tarps, and beside them a dozen or so soldiers were gathered around a lantern; they looked up as the 58th approached, and a pale blond man emerged from the group and came forward. Captain Jenning.

"Good evening, sir," he said, saluting, and McQueen returned it; they were here as support, but the Army was in charge of the operation. "Good to have you here. Norris," he added to the man who had escorted them, "tell Clemson to go relieve Pirelli, and Kay and Blackman to take the forward posts." The lieutenant nodded and left; Jenning turned back to McQueen.

"Your squad can dig in across from us; we've put the latrine just down the hill, so stay up near the crest. There's coffee on, if you'd like some."

"Thanks." The area the captain had indicated was more or less level, sheltered behind another rise. The squad hiked the fifty yards and shucked their packs gratefully; behind them Jenning called, "Hey, GI! Bring that jug over here!" before he and McQueen followed.

Cooper sat down next to his pack and began to stretch out his aching shoulders. McQueen glanced over at them. "Take ten minutes, then start digging in," he ordered. He and the captain were talking quietly, looking out through the growing darkness at where human real estate ended and chig began. Some of the squad were unpacking their mess kits and holding cups for the private Jenning had called "GI" to fill, but Cooper didn't want coffee; he worked his neck muscles and watched the greenish-white glow of the sun settle toward the irregular horizon, until the others were finished.

They had to cut through the ground cover again before they could start digging, but soon enough they had a burrow dug and tarped over. They saved the mat of fiber and put it down in the bottom; "Humanity's first upholstered foxhole," Wang called it, grinning, but Phousse pointed out that the Army had probably done the same thing. Then they broke out the rations they'd carried and went with McQueen and Jenning back over to the Army camp for chow. By now it was full dark, and they picked their footing with flashlights until they reached the pool of light thrown by the Army's lanterns. The haze was dissipating, though; Cooper could see stars appearing overhead, one by one.

The soldiers had set up a stovebox, and there was a big pot on it, heating. Lieutenant Norris was standing over it, and he lifted a hand as they came up. "Evening. There's plenty, if you want some."

Cooper squinted into the pot. Dehydrated chunks of something puffed out soggily as they floated; it didn't look that great, but the MREs the 58th was carrying weren't so wonderful either. Plus the heat-tabs in them didn't work very well, and with the sun down, and now that they'd stopped moving, he was getting cold. "What is it?"

"The bag said chicken stew, but the Army won't be responsible for what your stomach says." He looked around, then cuffed angrily at the man next to him. "Dammit, GI, I can't stir this stuff with my arm! Where's the spoon?" It was the private who'd brought them the coffee; he dashed off and returned with a ladle, handing it to the lieutenant with a muttered apology, ducking his head. "Fuck," said Norris to no one in particular, and swiped it through the pot.

The stew actually smelled pretty good as it heated. Cooper and the rest of the squad sat in a rough semi-circle around the stovebox and the biggest lantern, and the soldiers joined them, except for the ones still on watch. Pirelli, the other one who'd been on rear guard when they came in, dropped down between him and Wang. She was blonde, with her hair in tiny braids tight against her head; Cooper liked the way it looked. "Where're you from, sirs?" she asked.

"Philadelphia," Cooper told her, and she nodded, but when Wang said "Chicago" she rounded on him, grinning.

"Hey. You know how the Bears are doing?" And that was enough to get them started. Around the circle most of them were talking, now--quietly, but the camp seemed secure enough. Cooper let the sound of conversation blur over him and tilted his head back, looking up at the sky; the stars looked fuzzy, through an atmosphere again, and there didn't seem to be enough of them. There wasn't any moon, either. McQueen came up beside him, then, and Cooper shifted over a little to make room. He sat down and began peeling open an MRE.

"There's chicken stew, sir," Cooper told him.

"There's canned peaches," McQueen answered and fished one out, swallowing it and licking the juice off his fingers. They smiled, privately, at each other. Norris began dishing out the stew, then, and Cooper got a bowl of it, propping it in his lap, and opened his MRE to see if it had anything worth eating. There was a can of pears, which he didn't like, but when Pirelli saw them she offered to trade for half of a chocolate bar, and he'd always liked chocolate; he handed her the can and put the chocolate in a pocket for later. The stew didn't taste as good as it smelled, but at least it was hot. Vansen and West tried it, though, and then put it aside and popped the heat-tabs on their MREs instead. Cooper eyed the rest of his--steak sandwich, it claimed. Grease was congealed around the lump of meat, not looking as though it would melt even if he did pop the tabs. But the bread wasn't bad, and he sopped it in the stew and ate it, feeling the warmth expand comfortably through him.

"GI," Jenning ordered, "take some of this around to the guard posts." He waved a hand, and the private hastily pushed away his own half-finished meal to get up and start ladling stew into extra bowls. The captain sat down on McQueen's other side and asked him something about the base camp they'd been landed at, and McQueen turned away to answer him; Cooper watched them talk, and behind Jenning he saw GI get up from his crouch by the stovebox, arms full, and take a few steps toward the forward posts. Then one of the soldiers sitting on the ground stuck a leg in his way.

GI stumbled, fractionally; then his other foot flashed forward and he caught his balance again before any of the bowls had even slopped. The motion was swift and agile, and totally unlike the way he had flinched away from Norris, earlier. But he didn't say anything, only sidled away from the others, picking his way carefully across the ground, and disappeared into the dark beyond the lanterns' range. Behind him, the one who had tripped him said something to the woman next to him, and they both laughed.

Cooper's stomach chilled. "Who's that?" he demanded, and then turned around and whacked Pirelli's leg, interrupting whatever she was saying to Wang. "The one the captain sent out. Who is he?"

She looked around, annoyed. "Who, GI? His name's Brian Ortman." Cooper could hear the dislike in her voice. "Why?"

"Brian?" Wang repeated, sounding surprised. "I figured his name was Joe. Why do you call him GI, then?"

Pirelli snorted. "Because he's a goddamned in-vitro, that's why."

Cooper didn't even know he'd moved, but Pirelli was recoiling back, and his stew was splattered across the ground between them; he was up on one knee and McQueen's hand was clamped painfully around his right arm, hauling him back. " _Hawkes!_ Freeze it, Lieutenant!"

He jerked in fury against the vise of McQueen's hand. He'd been lunging at her, like he'd lunged at Perlick, but McQueen had been faster again; pain lanced through his upper arm, where McQueen was gouging the nerve, and his hand was going numb.

Don't go berserk, the Colonel had told him after the fight in the gym. Focus. Use it. Cooper sucked in air, sharply, between his teeth, and forced his muscles to relax a little. Use it for what? He wanted to go find Ortman, and he wanted to beat the shit out of Pirelli.

"What the _fuck?_ " Pirelli demanded. She was on her feet, and so were some of the others, the Army and the 58th as well, staring at them. McQueen pulled him up too, and eased off the nerve, but didn't let go. "Jesus," Pirelli said disgustedly, "he's one too."

"Yeah," Cooper started to sneer in a voice he hadn't used in weeks, but McQueen overrode him.

"Lieutenant Hawkes isn't the only in-vitro Marine here," he snapped. "You got a problem with in-vitros, soldier?"

Pirelli opened her mouth, and then shut it abruptly and stared at McQueen. The squad was staring too, but when Pirelli's face changed they shifted, edging closer. Wang was next to him, now, and Damphousse's weight was on her toes, watching Pirelli.

"No, _sir,_ " Pirelli said flatly. Now her face was absolutely blank, unreadable.

Captain Jenning hadn't reacted as fast as McQueen had, but he was there now, shoving in between Pirelli and the Marines. McQueen yanked Cooper around, hard enough that he stumbled a step toward the Colonel, and away from her. Their faces were close, and McQueen's was tense and angry. "Go square away the camp, Lieutenant," he ordered, and shoved him toward their foxhole.

"Sir--" Cooper protested, and McQueen repeated, fiercely, " _Now,_ Hawkes!"

Cooper knew he shouldn't hit her, and he wouldn't. But he wanted to find Ortman. And he didn't want to leave McQueen alone among the natural-borns. But he turned and stalked away across the alien ground toward their dugout. The Colonel had given him an order, and Cooper had seen the warning in his eyes when he'd said it.

There wasn't really anything that needed to be done there, anyway, and Cooper knew that McQueen knew it. He unclipped his flashlight and dragged the packs into the shelter of the tarp, ranging them along the side of the burrow so that the others would be able to get at them, but there was still some room to lie down. He set up a lantern next to them and turned it on low; when he crawled out again it was throwing strange, dim figures of light through the tarp's cammo pattern. Then he turned off his flashlight and sat down on the foxhole's edge, staring at the muffled glow and trying to hear, behind him, what they were saying at the Army camp. But it was too far, and he couldn't make out the voices.

After a moment he took the chocolate bar out of his pocket and flung it, as hard as he could, downhill toward the latrine. He didn't want to eat anything of Pirelli's.

Then he did hear something: footsteps. He twisted, squinting back into the darkness, and saw someone approaching, a silhouette blocking the distant light of the other camp. "Lieutenant Hawkes?" said a hesitant voice. Not one of the squad.

"Ortman?"

He could see a little better now, as GI--Ortman--came up to stand beside him, in the light filtering through the tarp. Cooper got to his feet, hastily.

"Colonel McQueen said you wanted to see me, sir," said Ortman, on a questioning note. He wasn't looking at Cooper, but a little to the side, the way he had ducked his head away from Norris. The way Cooper had never looked straight at a monitor--only past them, afraid to look back, into their eyes. Cooper recognized the look, and hated it.

Ortman didn't know. No one had told him. Cooper's heart was pounding.

"What are you?" he asked, abruptly. 

Ortman glanced right at him at that, startled. Then he gasped.

"Ortman, Brian, gene pool twelve-F, batch tau six seven nine one, Tallahassee facility," he recited quickly, and seemed to freeze, eyes wide.

"Hawkes, Cooper," Cooper told him. "Gene pool sixteen-A, batch alpha three four three nine. Philadelphia facility." He hadn't said it, formally like that, in years. They stared at each other for a moment; then Cooper said, "Sit down," and they sat, crosslegged.

Cooper remembered the first time he had seen McQueen, the almost physical need that had yanked him, awkward and urgent, across the bar. He didn't feel like that now, toward Ortman, although he was intensely curious about the other in-vitro. But he wasn't alone, now, like he had been then; he had McQueen, and the humans in the squad were his friends.

The astonishment was ebbing from Ortman's face, replaced by a shy awe. He was thin, a little shorter than Cooper, with long, narrow hands that he had folded tightly in his lap. Cooper's fingers itched, remembering the position; he flexed them angrily and rested his elbows on his knees.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Two and four months. Sir," Ortman added hesitantly, "you're an officer?" Cooper nodded, and Ortman asked in wonder, "You--command humans?"

Cooper hadn't ever really thought about that, but he supposed he could, if he outranked them. And he remembered asking McQueen the same thing once, long ago now; he wondered if he'd looked like Ortman did, when he had. He didn't think he could have, though. He'd been practically gleeful at the idea, and Ortman just looked stunned. "Colonel McQueen's one of us, too," he told him.

Ortman's eyes widened even more. "Are there a lot of in-vitros in the Marines, sir? Like you and Colonel McQueen?"

"There used to be more, I think." McQueen had been in a whole platoon. "But I've never met any others."

Ortman didn't move, but his eyes flicked momentarily aside, toward the Army camp. He said, tremulously, "I've never been alone with so many humans before...."

"Were you placed separately from your batch?" Cooper asked.

"Ten of us were placed together, but I was transferred away last month--sir," Ortman interrupted himself, "when you landed, did you see them? In the Fourth Platoon...." He trailed off as Cooper shook his head.

"No. Sorry." Cooper wondered, with a familiar pain, where the rest of three-four-three-nine were. They'd still be in their placements; his batch wouldn't be seven for months yet. Had they been placed together, or had someone been sent out alone?

Ortman had slumped, minutely, but without easing from the correctly attentive posture he'd taken. The monitors wouldn't even have warned him for it.

"Do you like it here?" Cooper asked him. "In the Army?" Some of the Marines, and the sailors on the _Saratoga,_ made jokes about the Army sometimes, but he'd overheard Navy people in the gym saying the same kinds of things about the Marines when they didn't realize he was there, and he liked the Marines, so he'd figured it was all the same. But he'd seen the way Ortman's unit treated him. He remembered Ortman flinching away from Lieutenant Norris's slap, and the venom in Pirelli's voice.

"I work hard, sir," Ortman assured him earnestly. "I'm a good soldier."

"That's not what I mean." Cooper jerked his head back, toward the other campsite. "You shouldn't let them treat you like that!"

Ortman looked at him blankly.

"Shit," Cooper said, frustrated. "You know how to fight, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

Of course he did. Six hundred and more ways; Cooper remembered the lessons. "Well, when they call you names, or hit you, hit back! Make them stop."

"Sir!" Ortman's voice cracked in shock and fear. "I couldn't do that! Hit a human?" He hesitated, then, and added tentatively, "Unless I was ordered to...."

Cooper remembered when McQueen had hauled him off Perlick and the others. He'd have ended up in the brig, the Colonel had said, facing charges. "There's other ways," he said, but Ortman only stared at him, trembling a little. Cooper watched him and wondered, suddenly, if they were kin.

He could ask. But looking at Ortman, he didn't think it was likely. Ortman just--didn't seem enough like him for them to be that close. Cooper didn't know what it was like, being kin, but he was sure family shared more than he felt like he shared with Ortman.

Ortman had straightened again, his back stiff. Cooper remembered in his bones what the position felt like, and remembered, also, resting loosely on another hillside, next to the drill field in the Alabama sunlight.

McQueen had been there, even if they hadn't been in the same squad then. And the natural-borns hadn't treated him the way Ortman's unit did, except for West, and a few of the others sometimes. But not most of them; not Pags. If he'd been in a unit like Ortman's...maybe he would have jumped the fence, that last night, and run for it.

He shifted uneasily, pulling his knees up and propping his arms on them. Ortman was stuck here.

The other in-vitro was watching him. Then, looking a little frightened by his own daring, he hesitantly uncrossed his legs and copied Cooper's position. His hands twitched, nervously; open. Not folded.

Cooper leaned forward. "There are no monitors here."

"Sir?" The whites of Ortman's eyes flashed wide; his body jerked.

_"Listen."_ Cooper hissed it, fiercely. "You're not being monitored. You'll never be monitored again. Do you understand?"

"Not--monitored? But...." Ortman's voice was shaking. "They told us...even when we were placed...."

Furious resentment still burned in Cooper's gut; flared in his voice. "They lied."

"No!" Ortman flinched away, shrill and panicked. "Sir, you're so much older...it's different for you. They promised us--" He choked off and yanked his legs back into position, hands clenched in his lap. "You're wrong, sir. The monitors _promised_ us."

Cooper was trembling too, his whole body strung suddenly tight with rage, remembering the terror he'd felt in the dormitory, when the door swung open and the monitor called him out. The endless, desperate time he'd spent cowering in the alley. The glint of the knife, stabbing down.

But even in Philadelphia, he'd almost hoped that the monitors would come for him, would take him back. It had been months before he'd begun to believe, really, that they might not. It was hard to remember that, but it was true.

They'd been monitored, always. Learning how to walk, and read, and do the jobs they would be assigned when they were placed. When he and Suzanne had sexed, the first time, and been so frightened. When Cara had woken one night shaking and vomiting with the flu, and the monitors had known, and inoculated them all, and cured her.

The monitors had guided them, taught them, protected them--pretended they had, anyway. Watched them, always. And Ortman looked more terrified now than Cooper had been in the infirmary.

At fifteen months old, McQueen had said, he would have stood still and let a monitor kill him. Ortman was barely a year older than that, and there was nothing Cooper could tell him that would reassure him. He took a breath and let it out, wordlessly, between his teeth.

"It's different for you, sir," Ortman repeated, more certainly.

Cooper nodded. He felt helpless. "It's different for me."

Then there was a noise behind them, people coming from the Army camp. Ortman scrambled to his feet again, and Cooper got up too, turning around; it was the 58th, flashlight beams picking out the ground in front of them. Vansen was in the lead, and she flicked her light at them and down again, before the glare could blind them.

"Hey, Hawkes. Ortman--" Beside him, Ortman had come automatically to attention. "Captain Jenning wants you."

"Yes, ma'am." Ortman saluted her and then hesitated, turning quickly to Cooper. "Lieutenant--goodnight."

Cooper breathed out again. "Take care," he said, and Ortman saluted again and was gone.

The squad was eyeing him sidelong, as they investigated where he'd stowed the packs. West was actually watching him, but it was Vansen who stayed near as the others slid briefly under the tarp.

"You okay?" she asked. She was standing next to him, but she wasn't looking at him.

"Yeah," he said curtly, and glanced around; he liked her all right, but he didn't want to talk to her about Ortman. "Where's the Colonel?"

"He was finishing up something with Captain Jenning. About tomorrow's attack, I guess. He'll be here in a minute." After a moment she added, "Nobody gave him any shit. I think Jenning was pretty surprised, though." She tilted her head back toward the other camp. "And they were calling him Ortman when we left. Not GI."

"Good." That was something, anyway.

Vansen glanced behind them again, and announced, "I have got to brush my teeth. If I taste that MRE for another minute, I'll gag." She sat down and slithered under the tarp, down into the foxhole, and Hawkes heard someone else approaching. McQueen.

They looked at each other, in the dim light through the tarp at their feet. Cooper was trembling again; he wanted to touch him, but he didn't know if McQueen would let him; they were on duty, and the others would be coming up again any second.

Then McQueen inclined his head slightly. Relieved, Cooper fell in beside him as he walked away. Neither of them turned on a flashlight, so that it was almost completely dark; the ground was rough underfoot, and they went slowly. Cooper could hear McQueen breathing, beside him; the sound helped steady his own.

Thirty yards or so from the others, McQueen stopped, and seemed to be waiting; he didn't say anything.

"He thinks he's still monitored," Cooper burst out, angrily. "He _wants_ to be monitored!"

McQueen sighed. "He's very young."

Cooper nodded, jerkily. "And he's alone."

They were silent for a moment; then McQueen cleared his throat. His voice was tight. "Are you kin?"

"I didn't ask."

"No?" McQueen moved, abruptly, and stilled again. "I thought you would."

Cooper shrugged, frustrated. He'd have thought he would, too. But even at first, it hadn't--felt right. The way Ortman moved, flinching aside. "Didn't seem worth it," he muttered, and beside him McQueen took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. Cooper wasn't sure if he meant it as comforting, but it was.

"What happened back there, sir?"

"Nothing much, really," McQueen told him. "Jenning put Pirelli on KP, and nobody started breaking heads. Just tense, for a while."

"Nobody--gave you any shit?" Cooper hesitated, and added, "I didn't want to leave you there."

In the darkness McQueen's hand touched his arm, briefly. "Nobody gave me any shit, Hawkes. I probably shocked the hell out of them."

Cooper's skin was aching, where McQueen had brushed his sleeve; he wanted to reach out, touch him again, but McQueen unclipped his flashlight and snapped it on, a circle of light on the ground at their feet. "Time to turn in. There's a lot to do tomorrow."

Back at the foxhole, Wang and Vansen were crouching on the ground, brushing their teeth; Damphousse was under cover, and a wavering light down the hill was probably West. Wang and Vansen looked up as they came close, and Wang spat into his cup and asked, "Orders for tonight, sir?"

"When we're all here." McQueen raised his voice. "Damphousse! Never mind the mints on our pillows; come topside."

Damphousse squirmed out from under the tarp and stood up, brushing herself off, and West was coming back up the hillside. "Meals refusing to exit," he remarked sourly, then saw the Colonel and straightened. "Sir."

"Okay," McQueen said, casting a look around that pulled them all in. "Reveille at 0700; that's about an hour after local dawn. We'll split the night into three watches: Hawkes and West first, then me and Wang, then Vansen and Damphousse, three hours each. The password is _domo,_ response _arigato._ Time now will be--" he lifted his wrist, and Cooper and the others did the same, checking the luminescent dials of their watches-- "2148. Ready, _hack._ " There was a short burst of bleeping. "Okay, let's get squared away. Big day tomorrow."

Cooper brushed his teeth and hiked down the hill for a crap. Squatting, he stared up through the night at the Army camp, darkened and quiet as their own, now, and clenched his jaw, wondering what Ortman was doing. If the natural-borns were calling him names again.

Nothing he could do about it. And Ortman wouldn't.

McQueen wasn't like that. But McQueen was over twenty years old. No wonder he'd been so surprised, though, when Cooper had told him about killing the monitor. Even though Cooper hadn't planned it, wasn't even sure he'd meant to do it. The knife had stabbed down at his back, and he'd reacted.

McQueen never panicked like that. Briefing them before a mission, snapping out orders in the thick; even with Pirelli, McQueen had grabbed him before he could hit her. He'd sent Cooper away, but he'd sent Ortman after him, knowing Cooper wanted to talk to him. And he'd stayed focussed, so that nobody started breaking heads, and the Army stopped calling Ortman names, at least for a while.

He'd known the Colonel could take care of himself, even surrounded by natural-borns. Cooper just wanted to be with him, while he did. He felt--bigger, somehow, next to McQueen. Not just safe. Stronger.

Everyone was under cover except West, when he climbed back up the hill; the few stars and the lampglow through the tarp gave the only light. He nodded at West and turned his flashlight off, letting his eyes get used to the dimness. A light breeze was rustling the fronds of the trees, a sound more irregular and whispery than the muted hum of the _Saratoga_ 's engines. Cooper still hadn't seen or heard any birds or animals, not even a bug. It was weird, now that he thought about it, and he said so; West agreed.

"It's like there's nothing alive on the planet, except us. And the Army."

"And the chigs," said Cooper, and saw West nod. He blew on his hands and tucked them into his armpits.

"Moving around'll help keep us warm," West said. He gave a little puff of breath. "I just hope the Army remembers the password, though. I'd hate to be shot because some dogface thought I was a chig."

"I don't plan on getting close enough to let them try," Cooper snapped. He turned away, meaning to hike around to the other side, to look out across the ground they'd be going into tomorrow, and heard West follow him.

"Hawkes," West said, tentatively, "how'd you know? That Ortman was a--an in-vitro. You did, didn't you?"

He nodded. "The way he moved when the man tripped him."

"I didn't see it."

"He caught himself. Before he fell." He shrugged, turning to look at West's face, blurry in the darkness. "They taught us to fight, in the facility, almost before we could walk. It shows, sometimes."

West was quiet for a moment. "I didn't know that." Then he added, diffidently, "I guess I'm lucky I never took a swing at you. Before."

Cooper looked at him flatly. "Yeah. You are." But he didn't object when West came with him, circling slowly around the camp, gazing across the alien landscape.

It was a dull three hours, and cold. They talked a little more, and once West began singing to himself, very softly, when he was on the other side of the camp. Cooper listened curiously, wondering what kind of music the natural-born liked, but he couldn't hear it very clearly, and anyway West stopped again after a few minutes. He peered through the shadowy alien trees, alert for movement, but he never saw anything, and all he could hear, except for West, was the wind.

He walked around the camp in a wide, ragged circle, and sometimes jumped or ran in place to stay warm. West went off and checked in with the Army guard once, but he stayed away. And finally their watch was up, and he nodded to West and shouldered his rifle to squirm under the tarp and land on his toes, crouching, in the burrow. Turned low as the lamp was, he still had to squint against it for a moment.

McQueen was closest to him, asleep on his stomach with his face turned away. Cooper put a hand on his back and rested it there, feeling his lungs swell and sink with his breathing, before shaking him gently. "Sir. It's 0100."

McQueen's breath caught and he coughed, slightly, then nodded and pushed himself up onto his knees. "Right." He crawled forward and reached for Wang, who was curled up in a knot, and who jerked awake with a start when the hand touched his head. "Wha-- oh. Yeah." He rubbed his eyes and rolled over. Beyond him, Damphousse grumbled in her sleep and twisted away.

They crawled past him and out, and he stowed his rifle and wrapped himself in the blanket Wang had left. West tumbled in behind him, settling down where McQueen had been. The lamp was a little brighter than the glowstrip in the wardroom, but it was warm under the tarp, with four bodies close together, and he fell asleep almost immediately.

He half-roused hours later, as Damphousse wormed away and someone else took her place. "Shh," a voice murmured. "Go back to sleep." There was a familiar presence, and the cold smell of the outside. Groggily, Cooper pushed himself toward wakefulness.

It was McQueen. Cooper opened his eyes; he was lying curled up on his right side, and McQueen was next to him, on his stomach with a blanket pulled up over his waist. His face was turned toward Cooper, but his eyes were shut.

He couldn't be asleep already. Keeping still, Cooper listened as hard as he could. West was snoring a little, behind him, and he heard a footstep on the ground above: one of the women, standing guard. Wang was on McQueen's other side. Cooper could just see him, over the rise of McQueen's back. He was rolled into a tight ball, facing the other way; even if he were awake, he wouldn't be able to see anything.

In here is different from out there. But if everyone was asleep, it was almost like being alone, wasn't it? He slid a careful, silent hand forward, under the blanket, and touched McQueen's hip.

McQueen's eyes blinked open. Cooper'd thought he wasn't asleep yet, just from the way he was breathing. It was too dark to read his expression very well, but he'd gone a little tense when Cooper touched him. Cooper didn't say anything, just looked at him, and let his fingers rest against the cloth of McQueen's pants. He knew they couldn't sex, or talk, or anything; anything like that would wake someone up. He just wanted to let the Colonel know he was awake, next to him.

McQueen watched him for a long moment. Then he reached down and pulled the blanket higher up, to his shoulders, and under it he took Cooper's hand off his hip and squeezed it briefly, before he let go and pushed it gently back toward Cooper.

"Go to sleep," he said, lips moving on an almost soundless breath.

Cooper could still feel the pressure of McQueen's fingers around his, and he brought his hand up to his chest, hugging it to himself. McQueen was still watching him, and Cooper closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the Colonel's breathing, slow and deep and even, beside him. He paced his own breathing to it, exhaling with McQueen, and the warm sense of McQueen's presence followed him as he slipped, happily, back into sleep.

He didn't wake again until a sudden glare seared his eyes as the corner of the tarp was pulled up, and he heard Damphousse's grinning voice. "Seven hundred, boys and sir. Reveille." He squinted and blinked, and abruptly realized the position he was in.

He was still on his side, but now McQueen was pressed to him, the whole length of his back firm against Cooper's chest and stomach, and Cooper's left arm was thrown over his waist. They must have rolled together in the night. And the blankets were tangled around their boots, and Damphousse was staring at them, and Wang was looking too, rubbing his eyes at the burrow's far side. McQueen stiffened under his arm before he could move it, and Cooper's throat clenched.

Then McQueen put his left hand on Cooper's and lifted it off his waist, sitting up, and as he did he squeezed Cooper's hand again, like he had the night before, quickly but strongly. Cooper sat up too, behind him, and McQueen threw a glance around the burrow. West was awake, too, Cooper saw, but he couldn't tell if West had seen them sleeping like that.

"Okay," McQueen said. "Damphousse, if you're that chipper you can start some coffee." He pulled his elbows back, stretching his shoulders, and shot another look at her. "Let's go," he added, sharply.

Damphousse blinked, and then she seemed to come unfrozen and slid down and in, almost on top of the gear. McQueen kicked his feet free of the blankets and hitched himself to the edge of the burrow. Cooper followed him, but behind them he saw the others exchanging looks. McQueen swung up and out, and reached a hand down to pull him up to ground level; Damphousse broke out the coffee powder, and the three humans followed them into the sunlight.

They ate a hasty breakfast, cold rations and lukewarm bitter coffee, and broke camp. McQueen was curtly efficient, and Cooper didn't try to catch his eye. But as he came back up the hill from a last piss before starting the march, McQueen was on his way down, and he paused as they came abreast.

"I'm sorry, sir," Cooper muttered. He remembered the film he'd seen in the facility, the natural-born man and woman lying curled up together like he and the Colonel had been, and he'd seen the looks the others had been trading.

McQueen pressed his lips together, looking tiredly resigned. Not angry, though. "My fault, Hawkes. Never mind. We'll deal with it." He went on down toward the latrine, and Cooper climbed back up and helped Wang fold and repack the tarp. When Wang started to say something, though, Cooper glared at him until he changed his mind. It was his own fault as much as McQueen's, and he wasn't sure what "deal with it" meant, and he couldn't ask McQueen about it now, when they were on their way into combat. He didn't want Wang teasing him, and he definitely didn't want him doing it where McQueen might hear.

By 0730 they were on the march, the Army a few minutes ahead of them. The terrain they were crossing quickly got much more rugged than what they'd already covered. The mat of fibers underfoot thinned and tore to reveal stony soil, and finally faded away completely. The tree-like growths changed, too, becoming shorter and scrubbier. They were more like tall bushes, now, and grew in thick clumps that had to be circled or struggled awkwardly through. The ground broke up into steep hills, ridges they had to clamber up and then almost slide down the other side, into narrow gullies choked with vegetation. Even in the chilly air, Cooper was sweating.

The squad was spread out, keeping an eight- or ten-yard interval; the Army was ahead of them, with a couple of soldiers flanking. McQueen had the 58th's point. Damphousse was second, since she had the squad's radio, and Cooper was third. Not that they could use the radio, except in an emergency; the attack was to be as much of a surprise as they could make it, and they couldn't risk the chigs intercepting a transmission. Sometimes, from the top of a rise, he thought he could see Ortman, toiling along a couple of hundred yards ahead. The Army wasn't always keeping much of an interval, but no one seemed to approach him, even when the rest of his unit bunched up briefly. That was good, though; it made him less of a target, if they started taking fire.

They had eighteen miles to cover. Intelligence said the chig artillery they had to capture had a maximum range of fifteen, so after the first hour or so they were in range, if an air patrol saw them, or a scouting party from the emplacement. The Army had a warship in geosynchronous orbit overhead, though; chig planes weren't likely to show up here. Ground observation was more of a danger, and when they got within three miles they started bellycrawling over the tops of the hills, so that they couldn't be silhouetted against the sky. Even that was a relief, though, because the heavy guns they were attacking couldn't fire on a target closer than two or three miles; they needed the long flight arc for the shells. Once inside that range, the emplacement wasn't heavily defended; they'd take it out, and then call for ISSCV pickup once the main battle was over and the area secured.

From the highest ridges Cooper was pretty sure he could see it, now; resting for a moment flat on his belly he found his field glasses and peered through them. A bulwark, built of lumpy grey masses that looked like sandbags filled with rocks, stood about five feet high and three thick, surrounding maybe thirty-six square yards and three heavy cannon. The guns angled bluntly up and away from him, toward the path of the Third Infantry's advance. He counted eight chigs in the space, tall and insectile in their articulated environmental suits, carrying rifles or doing something around one of the cannon; as he watched, a ninth emerged from the bushy growth downslope and joined the others inside, through the opening where the sandbag walls overlapped. He scrutinized the weak spot briefly, and then pulled the focus back a little, to survey the whole thing once more before worming forward again.

In the huddle of chigs the cannon was moving, its barrel swinging in a slow arc toward him; through the glasses its mouth gaped black and wide, and he yelled, "Get down!" He couldn't hear the blast, but he saw it, a phosphor-white muzzle-flash that blinded him for a moment, and then there was the screaming whistle of the shell through the air. It hit less than a quarter-mile off to the left, and rocks and broken shrubbery exploded into the air with a coughing roar.

He hugged dirt, panting, waiting for the next one. Ahead of him McQueen and Damphousse were both flat as well. McQueen was half-hidden in the gully below, but Phousse was exposed on the stony hillside, and McQueen waved her down to him; she slid into cover in a welter of scree. "Hawkes!" McQueen shouted up. "What're you seeing?"

He called down a report, glasses trained on the bunker. The cannon didn't fire again, and they all waited, motionless, for a long time, although when Cooper looked at his watch it had barely been ten minutes. Then the barrel began to move again, slowly. He told McQueen, and when he didn't get an answer glanced down for a moment.

McQueen was talking rapidly with an Army sergeant; Jenning must have sent a runner back. The cannon fired again, and Cooper ducked, reflexively; but as far as he could tell the shell landed more than a mile behind them. There didn't seem to be any point to the bombing. He looked down again, and saw the runner heading forward, and McQueen scrambling up the hillside to him.

Cooper pulled him up the last few feet, where the incline was steepest, and they dropped back a little, behind the ridge and out of line of sight. "I thought we were supposed to be inside their guard by now, sir!"

"Intelligence must've figured it wrong," McQueen answered shortly. His face was sweaty, smeared with dirt; his eyes flicked over Cooper once, and then down the hill to where Vansen was crouching, and the rest of the squad beyond her. "Reconnaissance by fire. They think we're here somewhere, but they don't know where; they're trying to smoke us out. Keep your head down, and keep moving. And keep your interval!" He slapped Cooper's shoulder, and slid down to brief Vansen. Cooper stowed the glasses, gripped his rifle, and threw himself over the ridge, reaching the bottom even faster than Phousse had. She had already moved out, taking point, and he fell in behind her. The ground sloped up steeply around him, making him feel simultaneously protected and trapped. Ten minutes later, the ground shook with another detonation, a little closer than the last.

He was just over the top of another rise when the fourth one hit, and it nearly threw him off his feet; the force of the blast pounded his skull like a drum. Damphousse was yelling from up ahead, and he knuckled his eyes clear of the dust that had been blown into them and squinted forward. The shell had struck in the middle of a shallow plateau about fifty yards in front of him, gouging out a great hole with a wide spray of dirt and vegetation. And there were bodies, too, lying in the rubble, and others crawling painfully away. Too many; they must have been bunched up again when they took the hit. The soldiers farther forward were appearing now, running back to see what had happened, and he turned around and shouted to the rest of his squad, "The Army's been hit!" before hurrying down too, to help Damphousse and the others carry the wounded into the shelter of the steep hillside.

Captain Jenning was dead, and two others; the shell had hit right among them. Another one, Kay, had a broken leg, and Pirelli had probably cracked a couple of ribs when the concussion slammed her against the ground. Four more soldiers had jagged cuts from shrapnel or flying shards of rock. One woman was bleeding badly, the slash deep in her thigh, and the medic was already working over her, grimfaced. A couple of yards from them Kay slumped trembling on the ground, his face shocked and ashy, staring at the new joint below his knee, the abrupt angle of his shin.

Ortman wasn't hurt. He'd been toward the front of the Army's march, separated from most of the others, and the shell had landed near the end of their line. He had helped one of the wounded stagger away from the crater, but the woman jerked away from him when he let her go, and he edged back, watching the others. He threw a quick glance at Cooper, looking frightened.

Lieutenant Norris was standing near the wounded, watching the medic work and frowning fiercely. McQueen arrived, then, with the rest of the 58th, and Cooper and Damphousse joined them as they followed the Colonel over. Cooper's head was still aching a little from the blast, and the Colonel's face was strained and serious; he pushed through the others to stand close at McQueen's shoulder, watching.

"Lieutenant," said McQueen tersely, "we've got to keep moving. They suspect we're here, if they don't know it; if we've lost the element of surprise, we've got to hit them fast and hard."

Norris swiveled his head around, glaring. "Hit them? Are you crazy--sir? We can't go in," he said flatly. "We've got too many casualties already to be able to pull it off. And how did they manage to shell us? Intelligence said that artillery was no good inside two miles, and we're closer than that now. Obviously Intelligence was off-base. We've got no chance. I'm aborting this mission."

The medic scrambled up, then, dragging his medkit by one strap, and crouched to look at Kay's leg. His hands were bloodied almost to the elbows, and his clothes were splotched with red. "Cathcart's dead, sir," he said shortly, over his shoulder. "Femoral bled out." He yanked the kit open and dug inside, coming up with a hypo and an inflatable field splint. "Okay, buddy, I'm gonna dope you up before we straighten that out," he told Kay brusquely. "You'll be off with the fairies." Kay flinched when the needle jabbed into his arm, and the medic sat back on his heels. "Give the morphine a minute to kick in."

"How many are we going to have to pack out, Erskine?" Norris asked, and the medic grunted.

"Just him, sir. Everybody else is either ambulatory or dead."

"Pack out?" McQueen repeated. "Lieutenant, this mission is of vital importance. The Third Infantry is counting on us to neutralize this installation before they attack, four hours from now; they're vulnerable from this side. We are _not_ aborting."

Norris swung around. Behind him the soldiers were coming up, several with hastily applied field dressings over bloody tears in their uniforms. Pirelli was limping, with one arm pressed against her ribs, and her face was hard. On the ground Kay screamed shrilly, despite the morphine, as Erskine pulled his leg straight and splinted it. Norris glanced down at him, and at Cathcart's body, and then up again at McQueen.

"Listen here, Lieutenant Colonel," he snapped. "This is an Army operation. You are not in the chain of command. I am the officer in charge, and I say we do not have the operational strength to complete this mission. Plus we don't know what we're up against. Christ, they could shell us again any minute. We're pulling out. You think you're going to take command?" His eyes narrowed. "My people aren't going to follow a--Marine into combat. _Sir,_ " he added, scornfully.

Cooper had slung his rifle over his shoulder to help with the wounded; glaring at Norris, he wished he had it in his hands. But just lashing out wouldn't do any good anyway. He waited, tensely ready, to see what McQueen would do.

The Colonel's gaze on Norris didn't falter. "The Army may retreat," he said levelly. "But the Marines are going in."

Around him, Cooper felt the squad tighten, pulling closer together, closer to the Colonel. Norris's eyes flicked to them, and he glared back. If Colonel McQueen said the 58th was going in, then they were going in.

McQueen's head lifted a little, and Cooper could tell that he knew they were there. Behind him, ready for his orders. "If you retreat," McQueen added, "I expect that you'll file a full report on your decision when you return to base. In fact, I'll dictate my own, before you leave; there's a recorder built into our radio. You can take a copy of the chip with you. I'm sure both our commanders will be very interested."

There was a tense moment of silence. Norris spat into the dirt. "Six of you? Against them? You won't stand a chance."

"Yes, we will. And so will the Third Infantry." McQueen let his eyes slip past Norris, taking in the soldiers watching silently beyond him. "But we'll stand a better chance if your people are with us. We _can_ complete this mission," he said forcefully. "The situation can work for us."

There was a subtle shifting among the Army. "How d'you figure?" asked Norris suspiciously.

"They suspect we're out here," McQueen said. His voice was as steady and sharp as any preflight mission brief. "They've been doing reconnaissance by fire, hoping to smoke us out. So we let them know they hit us." Cooper saw a couple of heads jerk up, and Norris started to say something, but McQueen didn't give him the chance. "Leave the wounded here, with two grenade launchers and their M590s. We're barely within the rifles' range, but it doesn't have to be good, just enough to keep the chigs' attention. Let them think they've got us pinned down, while the rest of us work around and take them by surprise."

Norris had stiffened angrily. "You want my people to set themselves up for the chigs to use as target practice? Maybe you didn't notice we got no interceptors for when they start shelling again."

McQueen gestured up the steeply sloping ground in the direction of the chig bunker, invisible from where they were. "They've got some cover from the hill. Fire from the top, duck back down; everybody but Kay's in shape to do that." He paused, regarding Norris steadily. "This mission can succeed. Four here, keeping the chigs busy; eleven assaulting the emplacement. But without that distraction, and without the five of you with us when we attack, we may not take it. And the Third Infantry will take heavy losses if that happens." He looked deliberately from Norris to Damphousse, and the radio she carried. "We don't have much time. Is the Army joining us, Lieutenant?"

Norris looked as though he wanted to spit again, and not on the ground this time. But he glared at the Colonel and swallowed it down. "This is an Army operation," he repeated harshly. "You're only here as support, jarhead. Remember that." McQueen nodded and lowered his eyes; Norris jerked his head toward his radioman. "Chuan, leave the blower with Pirelli. We're going in."

Cooper shifted his shoulders under the weight of his pack, watching as Norris stalked off to direct the placement of the grenade launchers and order the semi-conscious Kay dragged further into shelter. He'd been pretty sure Norris would give in, from the time the Colonel had threatened to file a report. None of the 58th might have lived to deliver the original, but knowing that it could be recovered off the field would have made Norris turn his copy in.

McQueen had out-argued and out-maneuvered the natural-born, and he'd done it without even raising his voice. Cooper grinned at him, as they turned away to check the terrain ahead while Norris got his people settled, and the Colonel muttered, "Knock it off, Hawkes. Don't rub it in their faces." But he smiled, too, as he said it: a secret tank smile, that Norris would never see.

They moved commando-style from then on, fast and low and dodging from cover to cover. The 58th and what was left of the Army unit were interspersed now, and Ortman had put himself just behind Cooper, to the left; when he glanced back he could see the younger in-vitro sometimes, in a broken-field sprint down an escarpment or ducking through a tangle of undergrowth. He caught Ortman's eye once and raised his hand, and Ortman saluted quickly in response. A shell screamed overhead every few minutes, and exploded behind them with a slamming thunder; sometimes they could hear the grenades Pirelli and the others were throwing back, and the lighter popping of rifle fire. He hoped they were keeping a watch on the emplacement, so they'd know to stop shooting when the attack began.

Finally they were flat on the ground just below the summit of the last rise, packs shucked for speed, with only a hundred yards and a shallow gully between them and the chigs. They'd been crawling silently for the last fifteen minutes. Now they ranged themselves carefully in an arc, enveloping the chigs as much as they could. Through the glasses Cooper could see them inside their lumpy sandbag walls, gathered around the one cannon they'd angled away from their main target to put the heat on their attackers. There weren't as many as he had seen before, though; three corpses with messy grenade holes blown in their suits were tumbled twenty paces down the hill. The ground wasn't cratered there; it looked as though they'd been killed inside and then thrown out by the others.

Norris was handsignaling his squad, but Cooper watched McQueen for orders; the Colonel's fist was lifted, waiting, and then it punched down and Cooper flung himself from cover with the others, yelling, and opened fire as he charged.

The fighting was brief and furious. He blew away a chig taking aim over the sandbags; the corpse sprawled back and he followed it, vaulting over the walls almost on top of another one. He clubbed it with his rifle butt just as it fired, then rammed his K-bar through the neck seam of its suit. There was another one coming, and as he was trying to get free of the corpse someone next to him shot it dead; he yanked his knife out and turned to see McQueen just lowering his rifle, and beyond him an Army private crouching and spraying the enclosure on full automatic. His ears were ringing and the air stank of ozone. And then it was over.

He stood, panting, in the enclosure, with the chig corpse tumbled at his feet, oozing a slow green sludge through the knife wound. Next to him McQueen was helping the private up; she staggered a little, wincing and keeping most of her weight off her right foot, but managed to stand. Then McQueen turned to him, and his eyes raked Cooper's body and stopped, abruptly.

"You're wounded."

"Huh?" He glanced down at himself, following McQueen's look, and saw his left sleeve scorched and smouldering, just above the elbow; the shot had missed, but he'd been so close he'd been seared by the muzzle-flash. He ripped the cloth further open and peered at the burn: a couple inches of raw and blistered flesh, but it wasn't deep, and it was only just starting to hurt. "It's okay."

McQueen took his arm and examined it, then nodded. "Get it dressed, Hawkes." He was already turning away to check on the others when Cooper called, "Are you hurt, sir?" but he paused long enough to meet Cooper's eyes, briefly, and shake his head.

"No. I'm fine."

Watching him go, Cooper exhaled, hard, in a muffled whoop of exultant relief.

Norris was shouting for order, and the humans were crowding in, calling jubilantly to each other and casting around for the wounded. None of the 58th had been hit bad; besides Cooper's burn, Wang had a knife cut in his calf, where he'd been stabbed by a chig that hadn't been quite dead then. Erskine glanced at them both, and at the private McQueen had helped up, and turned away; they could wait. One of the soldiers had been shot in the elbow, and was screaming with the pain of her shattered arm, and another had had a rifle barrel smashed into his face. Cooper didn't watch the medic at work on them, though. He was looking around, searching. There were a couple of corpses sprawled on the ground in front of the bunker, but one was blond and one was female, and both were human. He began to move out, uneasily, but before he'd taken more than a few steps he saw a pair of soldiers struggling up the hillside, with Ortman's body limp between them.

He skidded down and shouldered his way in, grabbing some of the weight as they carried him up. Ortman was breathing, but there was a jagged line of bullet holes across his stomach; when Cooper first tried to lift him his fingers sank knuckle deep in the exit wounds blown through his kidneys. They got him up to where the ground was almost level and laid him down, and Cooper crouched next to him, trying frantically to figure out what to do. There had to be something--but Ortman's blood was hot on his hands, more seeping ominously from under his hip, and nothing in Cooper's first-aid kit could come close to coping with wounds like the ones he'd felt in Ortman's back.

"Hawkes," McQueen said quietly, behind him, "move back. Let the medic in." Cooper stood up, shakily, and took a couple of steps back, to McQueen's side.

Ortman's eyes were wide and staring, unfocussed. Breath whined in his throat as Erskine ripped his shirt open and palpated the wounds, then rolled him onto his side and glanced briefly at the bloody mess of tissue and bone that had been his back. "Nothing I can do," the medic said shortly. "He's bought it."

Cooper wanted to fight him, to scream and _force_ Erskine to do something, but he knew it was useless. Ortman's guts were shredded. Erskine dropped him flat again, and he cried out and scrabbled blindly with one hand in the dirt, gasping. "It hurts...." Cooper's stomach shivered queasily, and Erskine wiped his hands on his thighs and stood up.

McQueen took a step forward. "Dope him out," he told Erskine.

"What?"

"You've got morphine. Use it."

More people were gathered around, now, watching. On the ground Ortman's breath had become a wavering moan. Blood was pooling beneath him, and his face was an anguished rictus. "It _hurts...._ " he choked. "Monitor--help me...."

Ice stabbed through Cooper's gut, and his throat froze tight. He jerked, and McQueen's hand caught him, pressing heavily on his right shoulder, steadying him.

"Erskine," McQueen said, very low. "Dope him."

The medic shook his head. "There's not much left, and he'll be dead in half an hour. I've got wounded who'll live who need it more. _Human_ wounded," he added curtly.

Cooper blazed with cold, murderous fury. McQueen's fingers dug hard into his shoulder, and Cooper could feel the anger in him too; it ran like pulsing blood through McQueen's grip on him, through them both. McQueen's voice didn't even change, but his other hand went to his pistol. The sound of the holster unsnapping was sharp as a gunshot.

"Dope him," McQueen repeated. "Now."

Cooper held himself rigid under the Colonel's hand, rooted by McQueen's iron determination. Everything in him was concentrated on Erskine's face, and the sound of Ortman sobbing in agony. Begging the monitors to save him.

Lieutenant Norris broke the standoff. Cooper hadn't seen him come up, but he was there now, jolting everyone's eyes to him as he spoke. Except Cooper's and McQueen's.

"Dope him, Erskine," he said brusquely. "That's an order."

Erskine's eyes slid from the lieutenant to McQueen, motionless still with his hand on the butt of his pistol, and Cooper beside him. Then he crouched down again and yanked a hypo from his kit, filling it rapidly and jabbing it into Ortman's neck. Almost at once Ortman shuddered and relaxed; his eyelids flickered shut and his head rolled limply aside.

Erskine threw the used hypo away and stood up. "He won't wake up again," he said to Norris. "Twenty minutes, half an hour. No more."

"Fine." Norris threw a quick, furious glance at McQueen, and turned away. "Come on, Erskine. You've got human lives to save."

Cooper stood motionless, watching the blood spreading slowly under Ortman's breathing corpse, and aware without looking of the Army unit shuffling away. Leaving the in-vitros alone.

Not alone. The rest of the 58th was there, watchful and silent. Waiting.

After a long moment McQueen's hand fell from his shoulder. Cooper turned around, slowly; he felt stiff and numb, now, exhausted. McQueen's eyes met his, for a long, wordless moment. Then the Colonel looked over at the others. When he spoke again, his voice was rough.

"Go on," he said. "They may need your help with the wounded. And someone should go back and check on the others; they may have taken more hits. Go report in."

Vansen cleared her throat. "Sir," she began, and Cooper never knew what she wanted to say, because McQueen fixed her with a glare that would have seared through battle armor.

_"That's an order, Lieutenant."_

The four of them exchanged looks, and then they turned and walked slowly away. Wang was limping. None of them looked back.

McQueen's taut-strung rigidity eased a little; he turned to Cooper. "That means you too." He tilted his head slightly, after the others. "I'll be there in a minute."

"Yeah. Sir--" Cooper looked at the open holster flap, and at McQueen's pale face. "Would you have shot him?"

There was a flash of wry pain in the blue eyes. "Erskine? No." McQueen snapped his holster shut again. "I would have shot Ortman."

Cooper nodded, slowly, without breaking their gaze. He remembered how the rage had seemed to flow from him into McQueen, and the fierce determination from McQueen into him. "Good."

#   #   #

Blood had dried on Cooper's hands, under his nails. He sat on the ground with his back against the rough alien sandbags and stared at it, flexing his fingers so that brownish-red flakes cracked off his knuckles. Ortman's blood.

Ortman had died while they were combing through the chig emplacement, searching the bodies and examining the cannon. Cooper had come back to check on him, after Damphousse had taped a field dressing over his burn, and found the corpse already cool. The blood was still wet there, and the smell added a metallic sweetness to the air around the body. Pirelli had glanced over when she'd come in, with the others they'd left behind, and he'd clenched his fists, watching her face, but she hadn't said anything. It had taken two people to carry Kay, moaning again with the pain of his leg, and someone else had died back there, too: another human. He didn't care.

Now they were all settled, the wounded patched up and the worst-off medicated, the dead lined up to the side. Someone had put kerchiefs or pieces of bandage over their faces. The dead chigs had been thrown into the gully. Would they bury Ortman with the natural-borns?

Norris had snapped off a dog-tag from each of the bodies, and Cooper had heard him talking, quietly, with the sergeant. He would be writing letters to their families, Cooper knew. Telling them how their kin had died. He had taken one of Ortman's tags, too, but he hadn't bothered to look at it, just shoved it into his pocket. Cooper looked at the blood on his fingers, touched one to his tongue. Crusted and bitter. Dead.

In the open ground in front of the emplacement, a couple of soldiers were setting up the stovebox again, heating another pot of stew. They'd eaten on the march, not wanting to take time to stop; Cooper had been hoping, then, for another hot dinner. But now his stomach cramped dully as he watched them set it up, and he didn't move.

McQueen came over, crouched down beside him, and handed him an MRE.

"I'm not hungry," he said, and coughed a little; his throat was dry.

"You should be," the Colonel told him. Cooper shook his head, and pushed the can aside.

"Hawkes," McQueen said, a little sharply. Cooper looked up, and McQueen gave him a canteen. "Clean your hands off."

Obediently, he poured some water over his hands and rubbed them together. Liquid ran over his skin to soak into the ground, blood and water mixed, and there were still some crusts between his fingers and under his nails when he'd finished, but his hands were mostly clean. The water was warm, and he drank some, too, feeling it soothing his throat as he swallowed.

"Thanks, sir." He capped the canteen and gave it back; McQueen nodded, taking it.

Cooper looked over at Ortman's body. "His batchmates are in the Fourth Platoon," he said. "Nine of them, anyway. He asked me if I'd seen them." He remembered Norris, stuffing the tag in his pocket and turning away. "Someone should tell them."

"Cooper...."

Cooper looked back. McQueen was watching him, the canteen held loosely in his hands; his face was pale under the sweat and dirt, and the stubble of two days' beard growth. None of the humans were within earshot.

"He was still on his placement," said McQueen, quietly. "Official notification goes to the indoctrination officer for his batch."

A monitor. The water churned in Cooper's stomach.

"I know he's got no kin, sir. But--I think his batchmates would want to know." He had wondered, sometimes, what the monitors had told his batch after he'd escaped. And whether Ephraim had believed it.

If Ephraim hadn't been dead by then. Like Ortman. Cooper would never know; he didn't even know how Suzanne had died. A knife in her back, probably, like they'd tried to do to him.

And Ortman's batchmates would want to know. He looked up at McQueen pleadingly. "Can you get Norris to notify them too?"

McQueen sighed. "I may have put my command on the line on this mission already, Hawkes. If Norris claims I threatened his corpsman with a weapon, he can have me up on charges."

Startled and indignant, Cooper flared, "But you didn't!" McQueen's mouth tightened, and across the open ground he saw Wang glance at them, and then away. He lowered his voice, and muttered fiercely, "You weren't going to shoot him. And anyway, you didn't even draw it."

McQueen shook his head. "It probably wouldn't stick. Too many witnesses. But he could make a lot of trouble for me, just by raising the issue, if he wants to. If he's pissed off enough." He looked away, at the bodies, and back at Cooper. "I can't push anything else on him," he said soberly. "Not without risking command of the 58th, at least temporarily."

That jarred Cooper worse than the shellburst had; the ground seemed to lurch sickeningly under him, and he clenched his fingers painfully in the dirt. "Don't--don't let them take you away." His voice was shaking.

McQueen's hand was three inches from Cooper's, flat on the ground. They weren't touching. But he thought he could feel the warmth of McQueen's skin, radiating from the Colonel's hand to his; and McQueen's eyes met his, held him steady.

"I'll see what I can do," he said. "Unofficially." He thought a moment. "Commodore Ross might ask someone to have a word with their platoon leader. As a favor."

Ross was McQueen's friend, Cooper remembered, and nodded. The Commodore would do it, and McQueen would stay safe. Stay with him.

McQueen looked away, then, toward the others, and Cooper saw that some of the Army were beginning to stare. "We can't talk about this here," McQueen told him. "Eat something, Hawkes; that's an order." He pushed himself up and strode away.

Cooper watched him go. He still wasn't hungry, but since the Colonel had ordered him to he dug a pressed-fruit bar out of the MRE and chewed it, slowly. McQueen had gone to sit with the rest of the squad, and a couple of the soldiers were there too. He watched them talking, and when the sticky sweetness of the fruit bar was too much he went over and sat down between Wang and Vansen, where he could see the Colonel's face, and drank some more water out of the canteen they were passing around. McQueen nodded briefly at him, almost too quickly for the humans to see, and kept on with what he was saying to the sergeant about the fighting they'd come from in Fornax. Cooper let the sound of conversation flow over him, and after a while he joined in with it, a little. The sergeant seemed friendly enough, and the other one had helped carry Ortman up. They were okay.

Around the time the few stars began coming out again, the main battle began. The front was ten miles or so away, and although the rough terrain broke up the line of sight they could hear the artillery, and sometimes see the brilliant flashes of airbursts over the Third Infantry's advance. Gathered around one of the radios, they listened to terse coded reports; they'd tried to figure out the firing mechanism of the captured cannon, hoping to use them against their owners, but nobody had ever been able to understand the operating principles of chig technology. So they just sat in the growing darkness and listened, waiting. Between the explosions they could hear Kay moaning, and the woman whose arm had been shattered; Erskine was running low on morphine. Cooper saw him glaring at McQueen, and wanted to glare back. As if another hypo-full would have made any difference anyway. He wished it were Pirelli screaming, or Erskine himself. But he remembered what McQueen had said, and avoided looking at the medic at all, or at Lieutenant Norris. He didn't want to do anything that might provoke Norris into filing charges.

The night was half over when the all-secure signal came, and everyone cheered. The chig base had been taken; and now they could call in their position and get an ETA for their lift out. Pickup would be early the next morning, they were told, and they set a small guard, in case any retreating chigs came that way, and rolled up in blankets for the couple of hours that were left, in the shelter of the sandbags.

Cooper dreamed that he was on Earth, standing in the cemetery by Pags's grave, watching the battle in the night sky. He was frightened at first, remembering that McQueen had almost been killed that night; but then he realized that the Colonel was standing beside him, shoulder pressed against his as they watched the silent flashes drown the stars.

#   #   #

They were on board the _Saratoga_ again by 0800. The ISSCV had dropped them all at the base they'd originally been landed at, where there was a field hospital for the Army casualties. Cooper didn't watch the bodies being bagged and offloaded; the 58th went from one transport straight onto another, back to the carrier. Sore and exhausted, they stumbled out the airlock and into the loading bay. McQueen looked just as tired as the rest of them, but Commodore Ross was there, waiting, when the lock opened, and Cooper saw the Colonel force himself upright and go with him. To report, probably. He wondered what the Commodore would say, when McQueen asked him to find a way to tell Ortman's batchmates he was dead.

The squad went straight to the wardroom. Cooper dragged off his clothes, grimy with three days' sweat and dirt, and headed thankfully for the shower with the others. It felt good, warmth seeping into his joints as they all crowded in and the small room filled with steam. He'd been cold all night, even with the blanket, and his burned arm was stiff and aching. He stayed under the water for a long time, even after the others had finished and left, and eventually the dried blood under his nails dissolved away.

Finally he shut it off and almost fell into his rack, closing his eyes. But after a moment someone was standing over him, blocking the light, and he opened them again; it was Vansen. She squatted down when he saw her, resting an elbow on the mattress.

"How's your arm?"

He sat up a little and looked at it with her. He'd taken the bandage off, and the soap had stung painfully in the broken blisters, but it felt better, now that he was warm. Just a burn, a couple inches of seared flesh.

"It's okay," he told her.

"Wang's going down to the infirmary, to have someone take a look at the cut in his leg. You want to go with him?" She paused, then added quietly, "Nobody expected you to ask Erskine to help."

Damphousse was wrapping a towel around her hair; she tucked the ends in and nodded at him. "Go on, Coop. You don't want it to get infected, or anything."

Cooper groaned, but she was right; he heaved himself up again, and dug out a clean uniform. Wang's limp was worse, and Cooper stayed by his side, shuffling slowly through the passageways. The doctor painted his burn with antibiotic and rebandaged it, and grumbled over Wang's leg as she cleaned the gash and taped it shut; but she didn't put either of them on sick call, and they went back to the wardroom. The others were already asleep when they got there, and Cooper didn't have the energy to do more than unlace his boots and peel the flightsuit off again; he left them where they fell on the deck and crawled back into his rack. He was asleep before Wang had even turned off the light.

He woke to the sound of voices. Damphousse and Wang were sitting on their racks, talking, and Vansen was up and dressed, writing something at the table. He rolled over, groaning; his t-shirt was bunched up uncomfortably under his arms, and the shorts he was still wearing constricted his crotch. Stretching, he worked the fingers of both hands hard through his pubic hair, rubbing and scratching the skin around his cock until it felt better, then sat up and untwisted the shirt from his armpits. He didn't like sleeping in clothes; they'd had to, on planet, but he wished he'd finished stripping that morning. No point in doing it now, though, if they were getting up.

"What time is it?" he asked, and Damphousse said, "Fourteen-twenty."

He'd slept almost five hours. He climbed out of his rack and went to the viewport, looking out at the sharply brilliant stars, more of them just in the little window than he'd seen in the whole night sky, on Clio. He was glad to be back in space; he didn't like to think of Ortman's body being buried in the ground. He wondered if they'd give the in-vitro a funeral, and if Ortman would have wanted one, or even known what it was.

When he turned around again, he saw Wang stretching his leg, gingerly fingering the bandage and wincing. West swung down from his rack and squatted next to him. "Leave it alone," he said. "You're not going to help it heal by poking at it."

"It feels weird." Wang rubbed at it once more, than sat back. "The doc shot me up with painkiller, and now I guess it's wearing off. It tingles."

"I thought your Bears shirt was lucky," Cooper said. "So how come you got wounded?"

Wang frowned, but before he could say anything West had answered. "He is lucky. He's lucky it's not any worse."

"Yeah," Damphousse agreed. "He could have wound up like Cathcart."

Cathcart had bled to death from a slashed leg. Cooper remembered.

"We were all lucky," Vansen said. She put her pen down and looked around at them all. "I mean, none of us were badly hurt, and the Army took fourteen casualties. Eight dead."

Eight dead. Seven humans, and Ortman.

"Yeah," said Cooper, and sat down heavily on his rack again, staring at the deck between his feet. "Too bad your shirt didn't work for them."

"Cooper..." began Damphousse hesitantly, and when he glanced up they were all looking at him. "I'm sorry about Ortman. And what Erskine said--that was horrible."

Cooper shrugged a little, but he was glad she'd said it. "I've heard worse," he told her, remembering the cold weight of chain, ratcheting tight around his neck as they hauled him up.

"Not in the Corps?" Wang asked. He sounded startled.

Cooper looked at him. Wang was watching him, his eyes wide and a little worried. They were dark, like his hair, even darker than Ephraim's had been. And Ephraim's face had been thin, more like West's than like Wang's round one. But he remembered Ephraim watching him, as he left the dormitory the last time, and exhaled gently. It didn't matter that Wang wouldn't notice, or understand it if he did.

"No," he said. "Not in the Corps." He looked around the wardroom at them all, and they smiled back at him. Even West, a little uncertainly at first, and then wider when Cooper nodded. Cooper lay back and stretched his arms over his head, then relaxed against the mattress. The burn on his arm ached a little, but he felt good. He was sorry Ortman was dead, but he was glad, very glad, that none of the squad had been hit.

"Hey, Wang," Damphousse said, "keep wearing that Bears shirt, will you?"

Wang looked over at her, surprised. "I thought you didn't believe in it."

"I'll believe in anything that'll get us almost scot-free out of a mission where the Army took seventy percent casualties. Don't even _wash_ it!"

"I wasn't planning to," he admitted, and glanced down at the bandage on his leg; there were some blood spots on it, but none fresh. "I'll settle for this any day."

Vansen had picked up her pen, but she hadn't started writing again. She tapped it against the table. "You know," she said slowly, "right before the attack, when we were waiting for the signal, all I was thinking was, 'I'm not going to die before Anne's baby is born.' That's all. Just, 'I'm not going to die before I see my nephew.' Like I was refusing to let it happen."

"Your nephew?" West asked. "I thought they didn't know what the baby was."

Vansen laughed and shook her head. "There's no way Anne's going to have anything but a boy. After our parents died Mom's mother and her sister, our great-aunt, raised us; they lived together, and they took us in. And it used to drive Anne crazy, that we were a family of all women. I don't know what her problem was, but from the time we were teenagers she kept insisting that we were, I don't know, unbalanced or something. I knew she'd be the first one to get married; she just had to get a man into the family. And she's always wanted sons." She looked down at the page she'd been writing, pensively. "Maybe it's because she's the youngest. Megan and I remember our parents, our father; Anne doesn't. She was only two when they were killed."

"It must have been hard for all of you," Wang murmured, and Vansen nodded.

"I just wanted to write and tell her and Ed that. That I plan on sticking around for the baby."

Cooper watched her bend over the paper again, the letter to her family. Her kin.

They were all her kin. Were they? "Hey, Vansen," he called abruptly, and she looked up.

"Yeah?"

"How many people you got in your family?"

She didn't understand why he was asking, he could tell, but she answered willingly enough. "Five besides me. Anne and Ed, and Megan, and Gramma and Aunt May. Six when the baby's born. How come?"

Ed too. "Just wondering," he told her, and she nodded and went back to writing. He watched her, still jealous, but glad for her, too. And intrigued. How could she and Ed be kin?

It was almost fifteen hundred, and Cooper thought Colonel McQueen must have finished with whatever Commodore Ross had wanted by now. He picked his clothes up from where he'd dropped them that morning and pulled them on, then ran a comb through his hair. "I'm gonna head out for a while. See you guys at chow, okay?"

They looked up curiously, and exchanged glances. He thought West might be about to say something, but as he turned away it was Wang who called his name.

"Hey, Hawkes."

He looked around. Wang was eyeing him, speculatively. "Ask him when we're gonna get some R and R, will you?"

Cooper chilled, a little, remembering. With everything that had happened since, he'd forgotten that they'd seen him and McQueen sleeping curled up together, on planet. That they knew, now. McQueen had said they'd deal with it, but he still wasn't sure what that meant.

He knew McQueen would rather no one else knew. But he'd said he wouldn't get in trouble for it, not unless someone in the squad filed a complaint. And none of them looked angry, or upset. Wang was grinning at him now, and Damphousse's mouth was beginning to curve up too, but the smiles weren't cruel. They weren't teasing him, either, like they had once before. They just looked--amused. Happy, even. Even West, when Cooper looked at him, only shrugged a little, diffidently, and smiled too.

He remembered them standing with him, behind Colonel McQueen as he faced down Norris, and then Erskine, later. Waiting, watching; ready if they were needed. Supporting them against the other natural-borns.

They were his friends. His squadmates, he thought suddenly. Not batchmates, but--something special.

Wang was still waiting for an answer, and Cooper smiled back at him, happily. "That's command," he said. "He doesn't tell me that stuff."

Vansen gave a laughing snort, and put her pen down. "Of course he doesn't," she told Wang, and waved a hand at Cooper. "Go on, get out of here." He grinned at her, at them all, and ducked out.

McQueen's hatch opened at his knock, and the Colonel smiled a welcome and let him in. He had showered and cleaned up, too, and maybe managed some sleep as well, Cooper thought, looking at him; he didn't look nearly as drawn as he had when they'd docked. "Hawkes. How's your arm?"

"It's fine, sir." Cooper rolled the shoulder, demonstrating. "A little stiff, that's all."

"Good." McQueen gestured at the clutter of papers on his desk. "I've got to get this done by eighteen hundred. Can you stay while I work?"

"Sure. Is it your report?"

McQueen nodded. "It's always better to get your version in first. Although I talked to Ross this morning--off the record." Cooper glanced anxiously up from the half-written papers. "I don't think there'll be any trouble," McQueen told him.

"Norris isn't going to file charges, or anything?" McQueen shook his head reassuringly, and Cooper relaxed. "What about Ortman's batchmates? Did you ask him--"

McQueen nodded briefly. "He'll see what he can do. But they're Army, not Navy; don't hope for too much." He sat down in the chair and pulled it close to the desk again. "Let me finish this, Hawkes, and then we can talk."

"Yes, sir." Cooper shut up and went over to the pictures on the wall. He liked to look at the one of the pilots, the ones McQueen had told him about once. Then he went back and lay down on the bed, closing his eyes; he was still a little tired. McQueen had music playing, not very loud and without words, but a strong tune, a rhythm that caught him up. It reminded him a little of the way the jets of his Hammerhead sounded, sometimes. He listened to it for a while, then sat up and watched McQueen writing.

McQueen looked over and saw him watching. "Bored?" Cooper shook his head, but McQueen was already leaning over, reaching to take something off the bookshelves. "Here," he said, "see what you think of this," and tossed it at Cooper.

It was a small plastic cube made up of many smaller ones, in six different colors, and each plane of them rotated independently. Cooper rolled back onto the bed, intrigued, and began experimenting. He couldn't quite work out how it was put together, so that it could be twisted on any axis like that; he wanted to pry it apart to see, but he thought McQueen might not like that, if he couldn't put it together again. So he just tried out different patterns, seeing what he could get it to look like. He made a blue X on one side, and then figured out how to twist it to get an X on every side, one of each color. Getting each side a solid color took longer, though, absorbing him.

He didn't look up again until the music finished and switched itself off, and when he did he saw that McQueen wasn't working any more. The papers were squared away on his desk, and he had pushed his chair back and was reading a book, an old hardbound one, with a look of sober concentration. Cooper sat up and put the cube on the nightstand, and McQueen started a little at the movement. He closed the book and reached to put it away, but Cooper leaned forward curiously.

"What are you reading?" he asked. He'd flipped through some of McQueen's books, but he'd never read any of them.

McQueen glanced at him, and then looked back down at the book. He opened it again, took a breath and began to read, aloud.

His voice was different, as he read, than Cooper had ever heard it before. And the words were different, too; their rhythm wasn't like normal talking, or like the instruction manuals for machinery or first aid the Marines had given him. It was a little more like singing, only that wasn't right either. It was almost a chant, and Cooper rocked slightly, on the bed, with the slow cadence of it; the sound rolled from McQueen's chest and pressed against him, like the thrust of the Hammerhead's engines against his spine. Like the music that had been playing, like the feeling in his stomach when McQueen had taken his hand beside the drill field, under the vast Alabama sky.

And then McQueen stopped reading, and looked at him. "What do you think?"

He hadn't heard the words. Or, he had heard them, but he hadn't understood them; he knew most of them, but they fitted together strangely, and they had rolled over him like the rumble of the wind.

"Read it again."

McQueen didn't seem annoyed, or even surprised. He just nodded, and began again. And this time Cooper tried hard to listen to the words, to understand what McQueen was saying as if he were just talking normally; and although some of the words were still strange, he tried to hear the meaning they held, the way his parachute had held him, once, in the middle of the sky.

"Out of the night that covers me," he heard McQueen say,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,  
I thank whatever gods may be  
For my unconquerable soul.  


In the fell clutch of circumstance  
I have not winced nor cried aloud.  
Under the bludgeonings of chance  
My head is bloody, but unbowed.  


Beyond this place of wrath and tears  
Looms but the horror of the shade.  
And yet the menace of the years  
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.  


It matters not how strait the gate,  
How charged with punishments the scroll;  
I am the master of my fate,  
I am the captain of my soul.  


McQueen finished again, and watched him, waiting. Cooper stared, still struggling with the words, but he had heard them, this time. "That's...." They were still reverberating through him; he was speechless.

They were McQueen. More than the music had ever been. They were what Cooper admired so much in him, what he longed to be himself and didn't quite know how. _I am the master of my fate._ All that determined, focussed strength, in the words McQueen had read him.

He still hadn't said anything, only gazed in stunned awe, but McQueen nodded at him as if he had. He closed the book and rested his hands on it. "I read that just after I was released from the mines," he said quietly. "When they--set us free, turned us loose to get along however we could.

"There were six of us left, and two were already half-dead of cancer, from five years of background radiation. I was lucky; I'd spent a lot of time on the surface, processing shipments, instead of in the pits. I was healthy enough. But I'd seen twenty-eight of my batchmates die, and I saw the other survivors ready to take any job they could get, to grovel and live like dogs in a tanktown slum and thank the natural-borns for the privilege. And I didn't want to live like that. Not any more."

He looked down at the book in his lap, spreading his fingers gently across the worn cover. Cooper thought he could have recited the words again, from memory, without even opening it.

"I read that poem," McQueen told him, slowly. "I read it over and over again. And I decided--that's who I wanted to be. I wanted to be the man who could say that. The captain of my own soul." His hands closed around the book; Cooper saw them tighten. "And no monitor, no supervisor was going to rule over me just because he had a navel in the middle of his stomach instead of on the back of his neck like mine, because he'd gotten eighteen years of childhood while I was gestating in a tank."

He looked up again, catching Cooper's gaze as solidly as if it were his head, and not the book, between his hands. "That's when I joined the Corps." His voice was firm, as strong as his grip. "To be a Marine, not a nipple-neck; to be--to _make_ myself--that man. It was the hardest decision I ever made. But I've never regretted it."

Held fast, Cooper whispered, "I am the master of my soul," trying to feel the words inside him like he'd done with his music, but he was trembling, with awe and an uneasy stirring of worry. "I've never--never decided anything like that." McQueen's eyes were intent, pinning him, piercing him through to the core. "Joining up was the damn judge's idea, not mine, and when I--" He stammered, remembering terror. "When I ran away from the facility--I didn't decide to, I just ran, that's all...." Had McQueen thought Cooper had made a decision, like he had? "I just didn't want them to kill me; I didn't want--" He choked off, staring at the Colonel in helpless dismay.

The blue gaze didn't waver. "What do you want?"

"I don't know!" Cooper burst out, his voice cracking. "I like it here, sure, but I never thought about--about stuff like that, like you did...."

"Cooper," McQueen said softly. He put the book on the desk, and leaned forward a little, watching him. "It's all right.

"You're only six years old. You don't have to know yet. But...it's what you should be asking yourself." Cooper dragged in a shuddering breath, and although they weren't touching, McQueen's eyes were gentler now, like a palm resting on his chest, easing his breathing.

"Ask yourself," McQueen repeated. "What you want to happen, who you want to be. And when you know...make it happen. Don't listen to the ones who will call you nipple-neck, or tank. Don't believe them when they say you can't. You decide what you want, and you make it happen."

Cooper stared at him with a terrible feeling of inadequacy, next to McQueen's deliberate determination. He'd never asked himself that kind of question, like McQueen had; he'd just--bulled his way through, doing whatever he had to right then. Lashing out when somebody attacked him, going after something he needed. He didn't decide things, he just did them, because he had to.

Or because he wanted to. He caught his breath, in a sudden rush of astonished pride, of realization; it washed through him like music, like the buffet of the wind, and he exclaimed, "I already did!" He jumped up and came to McQueen, the strong arch of shoulder muscle familiar under his hands as the Colonel looked up. "You," Cooper told him, breathlessly. "I decided I didn't want to be alone any more. I wanted to be with you. Together, special, a--an intimate relationship, you called it--" He was stammering again, but not with fear this time, only because he didn't have the words, just the jubilation that was flooding him. He pulled McQueen up, dragging him into his arms. "I wanted it. And you wanted it too, but I came to you. I made it happen!"

McQueen's arms caught him around the waist, and McQueen was kissing him, hard and hot. "That's like what you mean, isn't it?" Cooper demanded, and McQueen laughed into his mouth and told him, "It's a hell of a start...." Cooper hugged him, kissing him back, wanting to suck the breath right out of McQueen's lungs into his own; McQueen was his friend, his squadmate, his commander, and more than all of those put together. He tumbled them both back onto the bed, pulling at their clothes, and when they were naked his skin wasn't a barrier at all. It didn't cut him off; it was the conduit that McQueen flowed along, into him, the strong sliding of McQueen's skin against his a shuddering pleasure that coursed between them as they touched. McQueen's tongue was in his mouth, both hands wound in Cooper's hair, and Cooper wanted to get inside him too, wanted to just plunge in, bury himself and never leave. He pulled free and grabbed for the nightstand drawer, fumbling the oil out and squirting it over himself, over both of them, and then rubbing it into McQueen's buttocks, his anus, the hot secret depths of him. McQueen gasped, his legs splayed wide, fingers clenching on Cooper's shoulders with every twist of Cooper's own fingers inside him, so that Cooper felt as if all four hands belonged to both of them; every move he made was echoed in the grip on his shoulders, and in the remembered feeling of McQueen's fingers inside him, too.

"Cooper," McQueen panted, "fuck me. I want to feel you fuck me..." and his thighs closed, clamping Cooper's ribs as he pushed his cock in, slowly, making a space for himself deep inside McQueen. McQueen was groaning, eyes shut, heaving under him, and Cooper pulled out just so that he could come in again, so that they could both feel him sliding in and in, forever. When McQueen grabbed his cock Cooper could feel the rubbing in his own, in the rollers of heated pressure along his length as McQueen's hand moved; he cried out and threw himself down to meet them. The finish was hurtling in, and he groped with one hand for McQueen's face, so that the Colonel opened his eyes again at the touch; Cooper felt himself caught and held by the intensity of McQueen's eyes as much as by the clutch of his body, and then he screamed, McQueen's yell blurring with his as it hit them, as the finish flung them convulsively against each other, into each other. They collapsed together, gasping; Cooper could feel McQueen's heart pounding against his, McQueen's semen pulsing between them as his own had burst from him, high and deep into McQueen. Intimate. Special. He'd wanted it, and he'd made it happen. 


	8. epilogue: awakening

They lay wrapped around each other, in the warm nest of McQueen's bed. Cooper sighed in sleepy contentment, feeling McQueen's breath warm across his chest, his ribs rising and falling gently under Cooper's arm. McQueen was drowsing too, relaxed and quiet against him.

They both jumped a little, startled awake, when the whistle sounded the start of the next watch. Eighteen hundred, and McQueen sighed and pushed himself upright. "I've got to turn that report in, Cooper."

Cooper sat in the tangle of sheets and watched him get dressed. "Are you coming back? Can I stay?"

McQueen raised an eyebrow at him as he tucked his shirt in. "You're missing mess call. Won't the squad wonder where you are?"

Cooper squirmed uncomfortably, remembering. He didn't mind, not any more, but the Colonel had only said they'd deal with it. "I think they already know," he admitted.

McQueen paused, and Cooper saw him remember too. "Nobody's going to file a grievance," Cooper told him. "They wouldn't do that."

McQueen nodded slowly. "No. I know."

"Do you mind? That they know?"

McQueen was silent for a moment, thinking, and then he gave a small, rueful smile. Cooper smiled back, in relief.

"I suppose I'd rather they didn't," McQueen told him. "But I'm certainly not going to let it stop me." He sat down on the bed to tie his shoes, and gave Cooper a quick, soft kiss before standing again to gather up the papers from his desk. "I won't be long."

After he was gone, Cooper found the little plastic cube again and worked it for a while; he'd figured out the basic system to move the colors around, but it was still interesting to experiment with. He thought about looking in the book, still lying on the desk, to see if there was anything else in it like that poem, but then he remembered McQueen's voice, saying the words, and decided he'd rather ask him to read aloud again. So he just lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes, thinking.

McQueen had Cooper's semen inside him. No matter where he went part of Cooper went with him, and part of him stayed with Cooper too, inside him, in Cooper's ass and his mouth and his stomach. Both of them outside themselves, outside their skins, in one another. He lay in McQueen's bed, in the sheets that smelled like them both, and felt McQueen moving through the corridors of the ship.

McQueen was gone about twenty minutes, and when he came back he brought a couple of sandwiches. "I told the Commodore I wasn't going to make it to mess," he said, and handed one to Cooper. "He let me take these from the line officers' galley." He stood a moment, looking down at Cooper sitting naked in the middle of the disordered bed. "Should I get undressed again?" he asked, and he was smiling.

Cooper grinned back. He liked seeing the Colonel in his uniform with the insignia of his rank, his achievements, but he liked being naked with him even more. "Yeah."

They sat together on the bed and ate the sandwiches: sliced turkey, and the lettuce was fresh. Cooper licked a smear of mayonnaise off his thumb appreciatively, and went to wash his hands at the sink. When he came back he almost sat on the plastic cube, where he'd left it among the bedclothes; he fished it out and offered it to McQueen. "Here, sir. Thanks."

"Do you like it?"

"Yeah." It wasn't really that complicated; it was just that it kept shifting. And he still wondered how it was put together.

"Keep it," McQueen told him. He pushed Cooper's hand back, still holding the cube. "I came across it in a catalogue when I was looking up that antique electronics listing for you. I wondered if you'd like it."

McQueen had gotten it for him. "Thanks," Cooper said again, and moved to sit next to him, pressing their shoulders together. Through the touch, he felt McQueen take a breath.

"Why didn't you ask Ortman if you were kin?"

Cooper shrugged a little. "I don't know. It just--didn't feel right. I mean, I liked him, but...I didn't feel like I could be that close to him. Like family. You know?"

McQueen put a hand on his leg. Cooper put his own hand over it, and McQueen squeezed his fingers. "I feel like I should apologize," he said, very quietly.

"For what?"

McQueen sighed. "I was sure you'd ask him. And--I hoped you weren't. Even though I know how much you want kin. Because--I was jealous. I was afraid...if you knew you had family, you wouldn't need me any more."

"Not need you?" Cooper stared at him, astonished.

"I know how much you want kin," McQueen repeated, heavily. "And I hoped you wouldn't find one. I'm sorry."

Cooper twisted on the bed to face him. McQueen's gaze on him was pained and brittle, and Cooper remembered slumping bitterly on his rack, cut off inside his skin, watching the squad talk about their families.

But--he wasn't cut off like that. That was what he'd been thinking about, realizing, while McQueen was gone.

And there was what Vansen had said, too, in the wardroom that afternoon. He gripped McQueen's hand tightly, with an incredulous sense of possibility. "In the facility..." he began, and his voice was shaking.

"What?"

"The monitors showed us diagrams," Cooper told him. "With the natural-born in the center, and lines showing the genetic resemblance to each of their kin. Kind of--radiating out, you know?"

McQueen nodded, watching him closely. "I remember."

"Only...Vansen was writing to her sister today, the pregnant one. But she was writing to Ed, too. Anne's husband, the other parent of the baby. And Anne and her husband aren't genetically linked."

"No," said McQueen. "Kin can't marry each other."

"They can't?" That made what he was thinking of even more important. "So Anne and her husband--they're not kin. But they're a family. Even before they conceived the baby, Vansen said. And Ed's in her family, too. Ed, and Anne, and Vansen and all the others...they're kin, but they're not all genetically kin. There's no line between Ed and any of them on the diagram!"

Something flickered in McQueen's eyes: a guarded, cautious wonder. "What are you getting at, Cooper?"

"They're kin because they want to be," Cooper told him, breathing fast. "Because they _decided_ to be." His heart was pounding in fear and hope. "Could--could we do that too?"

"We're not genetically close enough." McQueen's voice was hoarse. He clutched Cooper's hand, so hard it almost hurt. "I thought...that's what you wanted. The genetic tie."

Cooper shook his head, hard. "I thought so too. I wanted to be kin with someone. With you. But--" McQueen's gaze on him held a fierce, astonished heat, as urgent now as the words tumbling from Cooper's mouth. "The monitors lied," Cooper told him vehemently. "They _lied._ The genetics don't matter!" He put his other hand around McQueen's, lacing their fingers together. "We could--even without the genetic link--could we be kin?"

"Yes," McQueen answered, forcefully. "If that's what you want."

And happiness burst through him; he grabbed McQueen and pulled him close, hugging them together until he could feel McQueen's pulse against his ribs, McQueen's arms locked around him. "Yes," he said, and the joy blazed in McQueen's eyes to match his own. "Yes. That's what I want."

**Author's Note:**

> It's always tricky writing fan fiction for a show that is still in production. This story was plotted and laid out just after "Level of Necessity" aired, and it broadly accepts as background canon everything shown in episodes up to that point, although I have slightly inflected a few details. Later episodes, however, flatly contradicted some of my grounding assumptions. I have blandly ignored these contradictions, while adopting some other elements of later canon. Moreover, this story takes place very early in the show's timeline. If it had happened in canon, some events after its end would certainly have transpired differently than as they did in the early episodes.
> 
> So this story is one of the minor kinds of AU. (There are, however, no elves. You have my word.) Readers disturbed by this prospect are requested to set it aside now and go watch an episode, where they may contemplate such canonical facts as that Hawkes was born in 2053 but was six years old in 2063; that skilled pilots are routinely used as infantry grunts; and that U.S. Marines under heavy fire never use the word "fuck."
> 
> Well, actually, they don't swear much in this story, either. I guess these are just kinder, gentler space marines. Enjoy. 
> 
> Content notes: Includes some Cooper/OMC and Cooper/OFC: sexual activity among characters who are physiologically nineteen years old, chronologically one year old, and emotionally -- not human (except physiologically), so, um. I consider them able to consent, and doing so. Also brief scenes of combat, and a secondary-character death by battle wounds and possibly lethal injection.


End file.
